The Naked Gardener Read Free Page A

must have been snickering and talking about what animals we were.
    One night, after we had rolled around for a good long time, we lay on the grass on a small hill between the barn and the chicken coop. When it turned pitch dark and dots of light began to emerge in the night sky, Maze reached for me and sighed.
    “This is heaven.”
    I had never heard that particular tone in his voice. With our fingers twined together we lay there and witnessed what was unseen in the sky during the day reveal itself slowly, in excruciating detail. How could all those stars possibly have a name? It would be like naming each plankton in the ocean. So it was possible to have these moments, to feel connected to the earth and the heavens and each other all at the same time.
    By the time move in day arrived, we had arranged the chicken coop so that it really felt like a summer home. Not exactly the summer palace at St. Petersburg, but we weren’t the Romanoffs.
    The still operable toilet in the rundown house was old but reliable, if you jiggled the handle a certain way and prayed. Maze and a friend had reinforced the rotten roof beams. Since carrying water from the house to the barn, where we had set up a kitchen of sorts, became an onerous routine, Maze created a rainwater catch out of an old porcelain bathtub he spotted in an overgrown field where cows once grazed. He built a platform that held it perched on the barn roof and snaked copper pipe from its drain hole into a sink that he inserted into a counter we constructed out of old floorboards from the garret of an attic in the house. Cold water of course. With a shut off valve. Some days we ran out of water in the barn. But when the rains came, we washed everything in sight with impunity. Our friends marveled at the ingenuity of it, spoke with envy of living the simple life, then went home to their tri-levels and colonials with flat screens and central heat and dishwashers and Sub Zero refrigerators.
    We built a wooden platform against the back of the house adjacent to the inside bathroom and ran pipes through to the outside wall and connected a showerhead with shut off valves for faucets. Hot water was a treat after bathing in the cold pond. Maze added three wooden privacy panels that spanned from knees to neck with saloon doors for easy entrance. Three hooks on the house wall held a towel and clothes to don when dry. An old wood crate turned on its end held soap and whatever else one needed. For shaving and combing hair we hung a mirror from a tree branch next to the platform.
    We arrived in the country in mid May, installed ourselves in the chicken coop, cleaned the bat droppings from winter hibernation out of the barns, Maze did his thing and I stayed behind to tend the garden and whatever else needed doing. I set up a studio of sorts where the pigs had lived and besides painting every day, and once a month packing up discs with illustrations to send my rep in the city – well I still had to have some income – tending to the garden became my main occupation. I soon discovered that a garden was a needy being. Like having quintuplets that cried all the time.
    * * *
    There is nothing gentle about gardening. One must be ruthless. Even the tools one uses are a kind of weaponry. They dig, stab, claw, rake, cut, snap. Creating a garden in Vermont was a struggle. Each shovel full of earth was half filled with rocks. Rakes ground against stone, trowels hit them with each downward thrust, seedlings had to worm their way around stones and, when pulled up, mature carrots looked like corkscrews. I raked and raked, removed buckets of stone from the flower beds, stacked them in piles outside the garden and still they came, rock upon rock, up from the depths of the earth like goblins emerging from underground caverns.
    I planted early lettuce varieties, followed by tomatoes, carrots, sugar snaps, kohlrabi, beets, beans, corn, radish, rhubarb, fennel, leeks. It was my intention to add new perennials