Baby, if I could keep it together, don't you think I'd try?

"And maybe, if I could make something of this, why wouldn't I?"

When I was growing up, my mom used to make us weed her gardens. I hated it, mostly because I hated earthworms. My brother and sisters used to look for them, especially, and throw them on me. It was horrible. So, in the summer, I would try to wake up early and head to the city lake to spend the day in the water and the sun instead, avoiding my mom's crap chores and the worms. If you could get out of the house fast enough, she would be drinking Coca-Cola and smoking and talking on the telephone and would completely forget what she told you to do that day. She'd just wave with her cigarette hand as you left.

I was practically 30 when I found myself living in a garden apartment with a patch of dirt and a rose bush outside. What is crazy is that I turned into this sort of gardening fanatic. I didn't know I had it in me, and I didn't have that much earth to work with, but I spent a very little fortune making it rich with good soil and fertilizer (the beginning of my poop fetish?). I also rearranged my flowers constantly as if they were ... furniture. Not a nice thing. Poor flowers. Poor roots. They survived. (The kisses, maybe?) People would walk by and say "I love what you are doing! This is how it was in the 70s. It's so beautiful!" And it was. Every morning, I would wake up and open the door to see what the delphiniums had done while I slept. God, those flowers were so amazing -- the really delicate variation of colors, blue and violet and purple. Also, the poppies. And these crazy daisies. Little ones? I had a big tomato plant in a huge terra cotta pot. I love the smell of tomatoes ripening on a vine. And they taste so good just warm from sunlight like that. You know?

Here is where I failed as a gardener: I always wanted the flowers to be in that just exactly perfect state of perfection. I mean, there was the daily pleasure to be found in how things might be slightly different, but I still ... wanted them to stop and just be how they were at one particular moment. I guess that also explains me moving them around and such all the time. I was trying to get just the right arrangement. On an almost daily basis.

What I'm saying is, you're right. Like those flowers, I'm not containable. Leave me alone. Let me flower, burst, and fade away.

"Let's leave this thing for awhile... it's too far gone. Too far gone."

Nah, that's Sarah Harmer, not me.