Home-Parting

Leaving the garden and my cozy home for a few weeks is hard.

I sat on the little wooden bench in our breakfast room this morning taking off my boots (permethrin-coated) and my tick socks. I usually don’t sit to do this, because it happens about six times a day – on/off, on/off, on/off. But my phone rang, it was my sister, calling about Dad again, and I decided to sit. We talk a couple times a day about him, our favorite topic.

From the vantage point on the bench, which functions as a de facto mud room (all eight square feet of it), I noticed the line of flowers down the middle of our dinner table. I had yellow snapdragons in a Ball jar, three sweet peas in an antique purple bottle, a half dozen tall marigolds in a turquoise vase, and a clutch of short cranberry cosmos in a little cobalt blue bottle.

At the far end, in a yellow can my husband mistakenly stole from a roadside stand years ago, a leftover bunch of flowers from my farm stand — snapdragons and daisies and zinnias and celosia – towered over the rest. All of these, two little bowls of salt, and two drip-covered brass(ish) candlesticks, currently holding seafoam-colored half-spent candles, are clustered on a table runner that my stepson gave me for Christmas.

The scene is cluttered but colorful and it makes me happy to look at it.

The breakfast room (/dining room/mudroom/kitchen extension – it’s a small house) is filled with light, thanks to a sliding glass door on one side and a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows, with the glass back door, on the other. It’s a pleasant room, and with opening up the kitchen last year and giving ourselves a nice soapstone-topped peninsula, it feels roomier and fresher, too.

The breakfast room spills into the living room, where our cozy old furniture clusters around a funky brick fireplace. We created this particular furniture arrangement last year thanks to an inspired suggestion from my husband. We basically used the couch with a narrow Parsons table behind it (stacked with his New Yorkers) to separate the “living room” from what can now be considered an entryway. The entryway is also a thoroughfare from the kitchen to the front door and the stairs to the second floor. The entryway has a couple small oriental rugs, a wooden “sideboard” (bureau) and a small bookshelf, so it feels like an actual space.

I think about what this house was like when I moved in eight years ago. My future husband had bought it five years earlier after his divorce. It’s a small Cape Cod, so there is potential for charm. But it was exhausted from its previous owner, who had built it in 1989 and rented it for more than 20 years. My husband had only done the badly needed repairs. Back then, he was still throwing himself into his work, leaving for his law office by 8 a.m. every day, working late, going to the gym and coming home to basically crash.

I think he read a New Yorker for a half hour or so in the dimly lit living room, where his vinyl records remained stuffed in cardboard boxes in the corner, next to the oversized red velvet couch he had lined up against the stairs (the only place it would fit) – the couch that would soon meet its finest calling as Farmer’s throne.

My husband let Farmer get up and sleep on that couch the first night we came for a sleepover (yes, Farmer came with me!). Note to suitors: befriending the girl’s dog will get you huge points. And then, of course, he (my now husband) fell genuinely in love with Farmer and took to telling everyone he was the smartest dog he ever met. (Apparently, perhaps as an afterthought, he fell in love with me, too.)

But though my husband is a smart, funny, kind, dog-loving man, he is not remotely interested in home decorating. I can’t hold that against him, because bit by bit by bit he’s let me warm up the house so that not only does it feel friendlier, it feels like home – our home. In the beginning it didn’t feel like my home at all, and it was unsettling.

It hasn’t been easy (the warming up part), because so many of my own personal belongings and furniture are still in Delaware. Those poor belongings have some miles on them; when I got divorced, they traveled from my old home in Connecticut to a storage unit in Falmouth, Mass. Eventually most of them came out and into various rentals, though honestly I’m still not sure where some of my stuff went. I do know that I had a book sale at one point where I said good-bye to so many books that I still scratch my head and wonder where something is, only to realize it is long gone.

Anyway, those belongings then traveled from the Island to Delaware when I bought a little house for my parents to live in (and possibly for me down the road, I was thinking then). That was the year before I met my husband. I moved into a furnished rental up here, and then back into an unfurnished rental. (I know, I know.) And some things I was able to bring back from Delaware in my car.

When I bought the house in Delaware, I basically crossed my fingers that I would be able to pull off paying both a mortgage in Delaware (small as it was – I got a great little house for a bargain!) and rent on Martha’s Vineyard. I looked at my remaining savings – and at my new (meager) paycheck from the Vineyard Gazette – and figured I was good for a couple years. I realized I would probably have to leave the Island, but I tried not to think about.

The last thing on my mind – after a disastrous post-divorce relationship I had allowed myself to fall into when I got to the Island – was getting into a new relationship. In fact, when our friends first tried to set me up with my now husband, I recoiled and said absolutely not. If it hadn’t been for my husband patiently biding his time and bravely cold-emailing me five months later, my life would have gone a different direction.

I’m pretty resilient. I’ve moved a lot, gone through lots of change, adapted to new situations and new living quarters, lived in everything from beautiful homes to ratty apartments, and I know that I would have made something good out of a new life in Delaware if that is what had happened. But it is hard (very hard) now to imagine missing out on this life with my love, and this home (humble as it is) that we have created.

After I hung up the phone with my sister, I was silently lamenting the fact that we are traveling to Delaware in the middle of the summer, right when my garden is starting to peak. We will be on the road by the time you read this, leaving a week earlier than expected to deal with some things down there that need attention.

I have a friend I trust coming to water the garden, and the house will have friends in it for a couple nights during the time we’re gone. But I will miss my refuge – my warm, flower-filled home.

And I will miss the dozens of bees buzzing in the blooming lavender, all the zinnias and cosmos opening up and the first dahlias in bud, the knockout basil in the hoophouse, the baby bunny who is living in the small garden. The riot of purple coneflowers. The wild blueberries are still ripening, the very first Sungold tomatoes are turning orange, and the black-eyed Susans are about to unfurl their lithe yellow petals.

I will miss the way I feel when I come in from the garden, having spread hay on the dahlia bed and added another row of twine trellising for the sprawling tomatoes. The way I feel in the evening harvesting flowers into buckets, every single one a marvel to me.

And I will miss our evening dinner ritual. My husband spins the washed lettuce from the garden and shells the fresh peas, peas flying all over the kitchen as they tend to do. We steam them (only the ones that don’t land on the floor!), make our salad, roast our chicken and sweet potatoes with spring onions and thyme, and sit down at the table, the evening sea breeze blowing the candle flames sideways and sending the wax down the candlesticks like a dripping sandcastle. We can hear the ferry horn sound in the distance, and the screech owl piping up as darkness falls. Outside, there are little green flashes in the grass everywhere – female lightning bugs signaling for a mate.

Fortunately, my mate will travel with me to Delaware, and our home and (overgrown) garden will be waiting for us when we return.

The Long Goodbye

The Sidebar: The Kitchen Reno, Nearly Complete

Garden Gram No. 30: Perennial Garden Refresh

My Vineyard