Lessons from the Garden

I’ve never been a good help in our garden. I’m a fair-weather gardener — I like to play around in my vegetable garden and mow the lawn but I can’t be counted on to help with the maintenance of weeding. The truth is I’m lazy. As much as I say I’ll commit to helping my partner Nancy weed, I’m a constant disappointment. I can always find something else to do — make granola, watch a movie, finish up “some work.”

Last week Nancy came home from her volunteer job at the local senior center. During her volunteer shift, Nancy was lamenting about the huge weeding tasks at home and asked her co-workers if anyone knew someone who could help her. Alice, a 77-year-old retired psychologist, piped up and said, “I love to garden and I’d love to make some extra money.” 

Alice, came over the next day to help weed. She’d proposed an hourly rate for her work and Nancy agreed. When I went outside for a break I saw Alice wedged up on our rock wall, six feet above the sidewalk, prying invasive plants from the crevices between the sharp mini-boulders that make up the walls of our yard.

Nancy introduced us and Alice told me she was on her second paid gardening gig of the day. Earlier she’d done Silver Sneakers and somewhere in between that she’d run home to let her dog out. Alice said that after being an infant and child psychologist she loved weeding because it was so simple and finite.

The next day Alice came back to weed some more. And she came back again the next day. After the second day of Alice weeding, I said to Nancy, “I want to be like Alice.” 

“Me too,” Nancy said.

Alice is twenty-four years older than me, twenty-one years older than Nancy. She’s old enough to be our mother. It’s not just that she’s fit and nimble enough to climb a rock wall and balance well enough to pull weeds from a precarious perch that makes me want to be like her. It’s her openness, her vulnerability, and her desire to be in the world. So often older people reach an “unworkable” age. They stop being out in the work world and become insignificant, invisible, something we don’t really see anymore.

In our culture, when people become elders we don’t shower them with the reverence that is commonplace in so many other countries. Here, older people are dismissed and ignored, something to be managed instead of honored. 

I’m not an elder yet but I am heading in that direction and I want to be like Alice. I want to take up the space that I’ve earned by living through each day, week, month, and year of my life. I want to be in the world, engaged, and alive.

I don’t know what Alice’s financial situation is. I don’t know if she wants to make extra money to buy gifts for her grandkids (she has many) or if she needs it to pay for groceries. It doesn’t really matter. What I appreciate is that Alice has a side hustle doing something she loves, that she pitched herself to Nancy at the senior center, and put herself out there. I can see that Nancy and Alice are becoming friends. This morning Nancy told me that Alice is coming over to weed again this afternoon. “I’m learning a lot from her,” she said.

In the last year, I’ve started a new job in a new field and I know I’ll need to put in some good time to really master this new area of work — may ten years, maybe twenty. The idea isn’t so daunting when I think about Alice. I’ve so often thought about professionally winding down. Sixty-five has this magic meaning. “Only twelve more years,” I’ve often thought to myself. 

But maybe I should be thinking about winding up if I want to be like Alice. Even if I retire from my “job-job” at sixty-five, I want to keep engaged like Alice.

Nancy said that after meeting me Alice asked her, “So, does your partner not like to weed?” Nancy said, “No.”

But after meeting Alice, I might reconsider my stance on weeding.