The Naked Gardener
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Authors: L B Gschwandtner
Tags: #naked, #Naked gardening, #gardening, #nudist, #gardener
THE NAKED GARDENER
L B GSCHWANDTNER
THE NAKED GARDENER
L B GSCHWANDTNER
The Naked Gardener is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or people, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Laura B Gschwandtner
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
ISBN 9781453734865
Table of Contents
The Garden
The Market
The Orchard
The Ferry Ride
The Women
The Trout
The Campfire
The Painted Ladies
The Trestle
The Virgin
The Storm
The Landing
The Old Woman
The Falls
The Council Meeting
The Rock
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To my dearest friend M, who lived the life described and who loves her garden, her plants and the frogs that live in the pond; and to my friend S, who goes to her garden naked in the southern heat; I thank them for revealing the threads of this story.
I thank my writer friends, Kim, Karen, Ann, and all the others who have shared with me their love of writing.
My ever patient, loving husband, my editor Catherine, and Neil, who made the cover come alive, I thank you all for your help and wise judgment.
Cover drawing by L B Gschwandtner
Cover design by Neil MacLean
One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use is the gardener’s own body.
Wendell Berry
CHAPTER ONE
THE GARDEN
It was a summer of firsts. The first month of our first summer in Vermont. The summer solstice, June the twenty-first: the first time I went to my garden naked.
Maze had gone to a symposium on Aztec ritual sacrifice and I spent the day nailing new boards onto the collapsed wall of a pigpen I was remaking into a studio for myself. Maze had fixed the roof so it didn’t leak anymore. I worked until I was sore and tired. Sick of wood boards and nails and sawdusty air, I stood at the half constructed wall. The sun had not set. There was a softness to the light with a fresh green-gold glow reflecting off the leaves. And without any conscious thought, I unhooked my jeans and shoved them down below my knees, pulled off my grubby tee shirt, kicked off my sneakers and stepped out of my panties. Off went the bra and I was walking like a dreamer along the grassy path to the garden. I never told anyone. Just kept going to my garden naked. Like some spirit hovering over the land. That was the first time. It’s three years later and I still go to my garden naked.
* * *
The growing season is short in Vermont. The ground doesn’t soften enough to work the soil until April and danger of frost hovers until late in May. By September the night air has a sharp chill. The first killing frost comes soon enough in October. It’s so different from Virginia. Like the world turned upside down and everything soft and easy rolled south while all the rocks stayed put up north. I think there must be more rocks in my garden in Vermont than in the whole of Tidewater Virginia. Yet the Green Mountains of Vermont and the Blue Ridge of Charlottesville did have a certain kinship, like second cousins, once removed. If it hadn’t been for Maze, I never would have planted a garden in Vermont, or bought a farm in Vermont, or even thought of heading north for the summers. But I already felt uprooted before I met Maze. Like the ground beneath me was unreliable. At any time I could lose my footing again. May in Virginia was already hot, the air heavy and humid, the rich, red earth bursting with life. But we left that behind. In Vermont the nights were still cool. The days felt like early spring, the plants not yet peeking through the rocky soil.
We arrived three weeks ago, came north after Maze finished teaching for the year, and settled into our summers-in-Vermont pattern. We roll along like a train with scheduled stops. Every weekday before dawn he drives off to the local college ninety minutes south to teach a summer class and research native cultures of Mexico at the library. We met in Mexico. It seems like a long time ago.
This morning after Maze left, the mail carrier brought a special delivery letter addressed to me. “Sign this,” she said and held out a small form. After she left I puzzled over it and then tore at the official looking envelope to find an offer of a fellowship for nine months – all expenses paid with an apartment and a stipend. In Copenhagen. I was stunned. Out of the blue like this. I hadn’t applied for it or even known I was being considered for such a thing. But that’s the way it works sometimes. You’re on a path and all of a sudden, another path veers off to the side and you have to decide which way to proceed, even though you can’t know what’s at the end of either one.
* * *
When we arrived at the farm, I put the annuals and vegetables in right away. The garden needed tilling and raking. You can almost watch the weeds sprout before the good plants have a chance to take root. I spread compost and manure, pulled up the weeds, turned the soil, raked the surface flat, marked the rows.
I always lose myself temporarily in the scent of the sun-warmed earth, the buzzing bees, the birds calling to each other, the squiggly worms burrowing back underground when I disturb their soil. Mine is not a structured garden. Not like the gardens of Europe, everything planned, clipped, and controlled. Nothing formal for me. I follow a random order. A disorder that contains a system all its own. I feel my way along and don’t attempt to contain what may happen. My garden is jazz to a formal garden’s minuet.
* * *
This morning before dawn, I was stirred out of a deep sleep as Maze bumped around in the dark of the chicken coop, trying to locate his shoes and socks, pants, a shirt to throw on. He stubbed his sockless toe on a part of the rough floor not covered by a rug, muttered a muffled, “Oh shit,” pulled out a dresser drawer, the one that always makes a gruesome screech when it catches on the left side.
I heard it all but said nothing, feigning sleep while Maze ravaged the room. Why can’t men think two steps ahead? Maze knew he had to be up early to meet his hang gliding buddies. He knew they would pick him up at six. He could have laid out his clothes the night before so he could sneak out before daybreak without waking me. That’s what I would have done.
Greg Mazur, sociology professor, student of native cultures, hang glider. Greg Mazur, who had lost his wife of five years to cancer and was hell bent on marrying again. Maze to me and everyone who knew him well.
He said hang gliding was completely safe as sports go. More people cracked up skiing than hang gliding. I countered that more people skied so naturally the crack up rates were higher. Maze said hang gliders were particularly careful whereas a lot of skiers didn’t have a clue what they were doing. I asked if it was so safe, why wouldn’t insurance companies cover it? Maze side stepped the argument with a shrug. He knew we weren’t arguing about his safety.
“If hang gliding is so safe, then why are you so set against me canoeing over the Trout River falls?”
“Because you can’t do it alone and I’m not experienced enough to go with you.”
“Maybe I’ll find someone to canoe with who is experienced enough and one of these days I’ll do it.” I stuck out my chin like a defiant teen.
“Why are you so determined to take risks like that but then you say getting married is too big a risk?”
“It’s different, that’s all.” I said.
“What makes you think it wouldn’t just be the way it is now? After all the time we’ve been together.”
“I’ve seen it happen.”
“Not to us. Not to me. I am what I am. You know me.”
“I can’t trust that. If we got married, you’d want me to be a wife.”
“Fetch my pipe and slippers? Iron my shirts? Sort my socks? What?”
“Didn’t your wife do all those things?”
The oblique reference to his wife hung there like a chandelier without bulbs. Hard to ignore, but providing no illumination.
“You’re just afraid that what happened to you before will happen again.”
I spun around to defend myself. “No. That’s not it at all and you know it. The truth is, no one could possibly measure up to your memory of her.” But maybe he was right. Maybe I was afraid of the past because I felt I had failed in some way. Failed to make it work before and afraid I would make the same mistakes again. If I could just figure out what those mistakes were. It’s easy to blame someone else. But deep inside, in a place where I didn’t want to search for answers, there was the nagging thought that I missed something basic in the music man, the one before Maze, the one who made me question the stability of any relationship. And if I had missed it once, I could miss it again.
Maze mumbled another “Oh, shit” as he knocked over a small stack of books that he himself had piled by the screen door. His leave taking, with all its concomitant sound effects was infuriating. He could have used the flashlight that always hung right beside that door in case one of us had to go outside the coop to pee in the grass in the middle of the night. It wasn’t as if he was disorganized in his work life. Or about hang gliding. I had seen all his gear up in the barn neatly folded and packed for the trip. He could do
that
ahead of time.
I turned slowly to face the woods behind the coop and heard a barred owl hoo hoo hoooing. Dawn was coming. Maze pushed the screen door open and stumbled as he stepped into his untied sneakers, his breath a little heavy in the still summer air. He peered back through the door inside the coop. He clicked the flashlight button and ran the beam around the small space past the mess he’d left until the light landed on the lump that was me under the covers curled up in our bed, eyes wide open now, facing him from under the covers. Maybe he knew I was awake.
“Bye, Hon,” he stage whispered to me. Oh, he knew all right.
Why couldn’t you use the flashlight before you made all that noise and woke me up?
But I didn’t yell. Instead I croaked from the back of my morning throat, “Don’t break anything.”
“Jesus,” was all he said and tromped up to the barn.
He didn’t have time to get into another fight, but did that
Jesus
constitute the last word? In a fight someone always has the last word. I wondered about that. Is it a triumph or a defeat to have that last word? A sign of strength or weakness?
I lay there in bed. I could picture exactly how many steps he would take to the barn door. Could see the rock permanently propped to hold it open. I know where Maze will stop. What he will make for a quick breakfast. What he will leave behind for me to clean up. The bowl with bits of dried cereal and a little puddle of milk at the bottom. The milk carton, half empty but not put back in the fridge. The cereal box open on the table for ants or mice to get into and leave chewed at the corners, spilled onto its side if the mice got to it first. Living out of a barn requires keeping everything in metal containers and not having much on hand. That means lots of trips to the market in town or going over to Trout River Falls to the farmer’s market. It means chores that
somebody
has to do.
My name is Katelyn Cross and I am now a permanently disgruntled person.
I ruminated on the word, one of those negative words that should have a positive opposite but doesn’t.
Could you feel gruntled?
* * *
After I heard the car with Maze and his gliding buddies pull away, I wandered up to the barn, made some tea, and stood in my sweats at the barn door, the warm mug cupped in my hands like a baby bird. I looked out at the gentle hills, soft green in the dim pre dawn light. Remnants of chill hung in the air. Soon the sun would come up behind the forest where deciduous and pine trees grew alongside each other, a forest in transition. One day the pines would give way to hardwoods and even the forest would be different.
Is there ever a time when everything stands still and gives a person time to get her bearings back?
The field of tall grasses that led to the barn was moist with dewy, glistening nets of spider webs. I saw in their sparkling, delicate pattern, a reflection of my own work with glass. This was what I had wanted to capture when I first smashed a piece of glass and added it to a painting, this essence of light at the very start of a new day, this crisp, clear view of a world full of broken fragments. Wisps of mist rose off the pond down the sloped field off to the west. Tiny goosebumps dotted my arms. I stood with both feet on one wide floorboard just inside the barn door. A bumblebee whizzed by my head into the palest morning light. The sun peeked through the trees at the east ridge. A shot of bright light bathed me in a sudden rush of heat.
I dropped my sweats and slipped off my T-shirt and God if that bolt of sun didn’t feel delicious on my naked skin. I wanted to dance, right there in front of the barn. Dance like a worshipper at Stonehenge.
Standing at the barn door, I ran my hand over my naked belly. Taut and empty, waiting for a life to fill it up. I was about to turn thirty-four and every time I soaped myself in the shower or caught sight of myself in the mirror dressing, I had begun to think,
Well? What are you going do about it? That body won’t last forever. If it’s going be reproducing, it better get going.
But I kept stalling, I didn’t want to think about the future. And now this fellowship offer. Another decision, another disruption to the flow of life, another change. So I worked the garden knowing it would provide me with plenty to do. I was cultivating turnips instead of popping out wriggly little bundles of joy.
I let the warmth bathe my body for as long as possible but when the sun moved quickly beyond the barn door, I stepped into unlaced ankle-high boots, the kind with heavy treads designed for climbing, and stood there naked until the beam of light moved away and so did I. Off to the garden. The rutabagas awaited me.
***
I found the farm. Maze was still at the university in Charlottesville giving exams, having conferences with his students. I called him to come up and see it on the weekend. He wanted to go north for the summers. I was a southern girl and had always lived in Virginia, had never thought of moving north.
The elderly farmer who sold it to us had lost his wife to a stroke. He turned to scotch and whatever else he could afford to pour down his lonely-hearted throat and just let things unravel. His daughter had decided to take him in, add onto her house, use the money from selling off the extra acreage and the rest with the barns and farmhouse to care for the old man. A farm untended goes to seed fast. It looked as if the Civil War had been reenacted on its fields. What did we know? An artist and a college professor looking for a summer retreat in the country. Hadn’t he done some minor house repairs long ago to make money during his college summers off? Hadn’t I always had a way with houseplants?
“The house is kind of a wreck,” Maze said when he first saw the property.
