My heart cools to gardening tasks before the weather does. At some point I start calculating the cost to profit ratio of weeding and choose slacking off. It’s not that I don’t love my garden, it’s more that tending to it becomes less about growing and more about maintaining.  

And maintenance ain’t particularly sexy.

I do take advantage of the situation, however. I pillage and plunder its bounty. Bouquets abound throughout the house and bits and flecks of herbs bring life to my cooking. 

And it’s a great source of inspiration for my work.

*     *     *

I don’t know exactly when I first learned about the American experiment that is this big, beautiful country. It’s so deeply ingrained that it feels as though I learned it by osmosis from the dew on the ground as I ran barefoot across the California grass. Eisenhower’s presidency was the first I knew of, sorta. My Republican mother had something of a crush on Adilai Stevenson, but was pretty keen on Ike nonetheless. The daughter of immigrants who had found home and success here, she was also proud of my father’s equally American story. His 9th great grandfather ventured on a ship optimistically named the Fortune across the seas nearly 245 years prior to her own father. Where else could that tale be told?

She adored Ronald Reagan. During WWII, juggling an infant in her arms as baby bottles spilled out of her bag and skittered across a train platform, a soldier stopped to help her pick up the mess. As he handed her the bottles he’d chased it was only then that she recognized him as the handsome movie star that he was, and in uniform to boot. She was smitten and stayed that way to his death.

She loved this country so much she decorated my disaffected teenage bedroom with fabric depicting the signing of the Declaration of Independence, much to my dismay. 

So it’s safe to say that it would have been pretty hard not to love this country having stewed in that patriotic primordial stew. To put a cherry on top of that, this fall one of my daughters and I visited the graves of our predecessors who died in the King Phillip Wars in the winter of, 1692.  Made our cushy existences seem small and insignificant given their privations and sacrifices. Nothing was given to them, they had to make and guard their freedoms themselves.

*     *     *

Which brings me back to my garden. I grouse about having to do these fall tasks not because they’re particularly difficult or onerous but because, frankly I’m spoiled. I have had the great good fortune to live in a country where I haven’t had to fear murderous hordes outside my door. I have the time to reflect on the miracle of a dahlia in my home empty of quartered soldiers. I can write whatever I want in these insignificant little missives without inviting censure. And I haven’t had to flee my country from persecution for them or any other nutty or not so nutty belief I might have. 

And yet, as I write these words I am more ever more cognizant of how fragile all of those privlidges can be.

As fleeting as a season, as fragile as a flower.

Painting: The Guarded Heart © Lissa Banks 2026