Vision Magazine

Greek to Me April 2007

Between Heaven And Helen's Half Acre

by Michael Raysses

I grew up in a small town in the Midwest that was anything but urban. Yet it wasn't really bucolic, either. So as a kid, I didn't really have a direct relationship with the soil. Actually, that's not entirely true—I would say that until I was in the seventh grade, I had a very tumultuous and intimate connection with the ground. One that culminated in our meeting rather abruptly when a friend of mine and I cut off all of the elastic from our underwear, tied it together, nailed it to the top of my family's garage, and jumped off, thinking the flimsy bands of rubber and cotton would guarantee us a gentle landing. The ground knew better, holding itself resolutely against our descent. Terra was never more firma.

I also had many extended family members who were renowned for their abilities within the plant world. My grandmother, and a couple of aunts and uncles allegedly made the Green Giant look like a desiccated lime wedge. But the best example of my family's pedigree was a great-aunt who lived with us for a spell when I was in high school.

Aunt Helen was old at a time in my life when dealing with her meant having to overcome my adolescent bias against the aged. (She also talked to her cat, Kukla, in a way that made me think she was actually conversing with it, which, over time, only made me love her more.) Aunt Helen's desire to converse with non-human objects didn't end with her cat, though. She also talked to plants. Any plants. She would tour our backyard, picking up odd twigs and stems. She would find a dried out husk of some fallen flower, and within a few days of water, sunlight, and a little coaxing in her native Greek, that shell would miraculously strike a deal with the devil and regain its life and vitality. She would then transplant it in some corner of the yard where even the birds didn't go, and by the following spring that discarded pod of vegetation had become something for us all to behold.

Aunt Helen's facility with all things green should have been all the proof my older sister needed to buttress her claim that my parents had secretly adopted me. You see, I inherited none of her abilities. In fact, I lived at the other end of the herbal spectrum—my thumbs weren't green. They were black. And clumsy. As I grew older, though, I eased into my role as plant assassin. I became a horticultural hit man. The heartiest cactus withered at my mere touch. I was the guy people entrusted their plants to when they no longer wanted them around. Things hit rock bottom when a friend entrusted his Chia pet to me, only to have it devolve into a brown mass of what looked like mutant bean sprouts. This was cause for great consternation because though I loved nature, that devotion never translated itself into anything even remotely green or life sustaining.

Despite a life of major disconnect with the plant world, though, I still think a lot about what I learned from Aunt Helen. Something I didn't realize until many years after the fact was the idea that a garden is a state of mind. Before I lived with Aunt Helen, I always saw them as articulated plots of land, there for the express purpose of planting, cultivating, and reaping what you had sown. They had little fences around them, and even the very ground had lines of demarcation announcing where the yard ended and the garden began. But watching her traipse through nature, I discovered that the garden was everywhere and anywhere she put her intention. And even when one of her pet projects didn't bloom the way she wanted it to or for as long as she thought it should, she understood the intrinsic value of that plant's life in the bigger picture of a garden that only she could see.

So, despite my failings within the plant world, I have come to an understanding of my own garden, the one in my head. That whether I am aware of it or not, I am constantly planting, cultivating, and reaping the fruits of thoughts of all sorts. And that with a little intention, some sunlight, and coaxing, there really is no such thing as a dead notion. Unless, of course, I am revisited by the plan to cut off all the elastic from my underwear, tie it together, nail it to the top of my garage, and jump off. That's something that deserves to stay buried beneath the surface, never to take seed.