The Therapy Garden

I love gardening. It’s in my blood, after all. Being at one with the land and nature is part of my family history with the love of sowing, nurturing, and harvesting—born out of necessity eons ago when growing your own food was the only way you were going to eat something you didn’t have to hunt for. Flower gardens were meant to bring beauty and color.

I remember Grandma Lucy, Mom’s mom, always having beautiful gardens. My grandparents didn’t have a lot of money, but Grandma Lucy always said that being poor didn’t excuse you from not having a tidy yard and a clean house. She lived the truth of her words.

Their house in El Sereno sat on a hill with the backyard divided into many tiers going up along the hillside. Out of the back door, you had to take a sidewalk to a set of stairs which lead to a concrete ramp that wound up the side of the hill until you reached the flat top of the first tier—which sat at roof level of the house. Grandpa Gilbert kept the little strip of grass cut short and neat on that first tier. Grandma Lucy had beds held by by brick retainer walls filled with beautiful rose bushes, which were her pride and joy. Going up more tiers there was a pomegranate bush, palms, more flowers and finally a fig tree at the top tier of the yard.

Along the side of the house below the hillside backyard, the entire area was concrete all the way down to the street. Concrete walkway, concrete stairs. But there were also concrete flower beds that broke up all that monochrome white and gray with bursts of color from the large amounts of flora. There were gardenias, large bird of paradise plants, tons and tons of geraniums in all colors, and lemon and lime trees. Going up the two different sets of stairs leading to the house on opposite sides, potted plants were everywhere.

There was never a time when my grandparents’ house did not have that aroma of all these amazing floral scents and the smells of citrus—and life itself—thanks to the beautiful year round temperatures of the Los Angeles area.

Grandma Lucy taught me how to care for her plants by pinching or snipping off the dead fronds, deadheading the flowers, and watering just the right amount.

Mom recalls the beautiful rose gardens that her mom had planted at the house she grew up in. She had a large picture window from her bedroom that overlooked the roses and it was a peaceful and beautiful time in her memory.

Grandma Lucy’s own mother, Inez, grew cilantro and mint alongside the house and had a giant lemon tree that pretty much took over the entire backyard as the years went on.

Grandma Lucy once told me about all the lemon trees in Guadalajara, Mexico where she was born. I don’t know when she went back to visit her birthplace, but the lemon trees left an impression on her and were nostalgic to her. It was also among these lemon trees that she also came face to face with the woman who was partly responsible for the murder of Grandma’s father when she was just a baby. But we’ll leave that story for another day.

My dad’s parents, Grandma and Grandpa Bowles (aka Grandma and Grandpa Kitty…because they always had cats), also had gardening in their blood. Grandpa’s dad was a farmer near Abilene, Texas starting back in the 1800s. He had a 900 acre homestead out there. They had a lot of children. 19 to be exact! And Grandpa was the youngest of them, born in 1910.

I once asked Dad when I was a kid, “Why did they have so many kids?”

Dad responded with, “Well, they needed help with the farm. So people had large families back then to work the farms.”

That didn’t sound like fun to me. Especially when hearing Grandpa reminisce about having chores on the farm from before sunup until sundown. The homestead is long gone now. The last time Dad saw the old house, it was falling in on itself. As for the family, they are spread out across the nation with many descendants still in Texas. I always joked that I could never date or marry anyone from Texas because between Mom’s and Dad’s families, I’m probably related to more than half the state. My DNA matches on Ancestry sometimes feel like validation of that.

Grandpa (on the opposite end of the family from his parents with his tie thrown over his shoulder) and all his surviving siblings (and some nieces and nephews) standing in front of their home in the 1920s.

Grandpa and Grandma Kitty struggled in Texas as a married couple with four sons. The area had become a big dust bowl and Grandpa loved to tell how when it finally rained one time, it rained mud from all the dirt and dust in the air. He claimed that his clothes and body got covered with mud drops. It was a phenomenon that continued to amaze him so many decades later.

By the time Dad was born, the last of the boys, some of Grandpa’s siblings or other relatives had already left Texas and migrated to California. They beckoned my grandparents to come and join them. They were finding opportunities for better lives.

So, my grandparents packed up their boys and moved to California—El Sereno to be exact, where Mom and Dad would meet as kids and neighbors. Grandpa and Grandma eventually came into the opportunity of owning their own dry cleaning business—the furthest thing away from the farming Grandpa had grown up with. The business was a full scale dry cleaner with the actual dry cleaning done onsite. Grandpa did all the cleaning, laundry, and worked the front counter as well. Grandma did all the seamstress work, sitting at an old fashioned sewing machine all day long fixing hems, resewing on buttons, and patching up holes. People didn’t just throw or give away their clothes back in the day like they do now. If there was a tear, you fixed it.

The dry cleaning business had a little house that sat right behind the building and a little above it. It was surrounded by concrete and behind the little house was an alleyway. Still, there was life. I remember potted plants and a wall filled with mint that had grown all along it. To this day, the smell of mint is very nostalgic for me.

In the late 1970s, Grandma and Grandpa Bowles decided to retire for good after decades of hard work and enjoy the last of their years. They sold the business and moved to Riverside, California. Their new house was small but it seemed huge compared to the one they had raised their boys in. The backyard was also small with a small grass area, patio, some evergreen bushes, and an old Cold War era bomb shelter that was always filled with water.

No longer busy with the day to day operations of a business, I’m sure it was a strange transition at first for them. Grandma began journaling and reading. Grandpa? Well, he went slowly went back to his roots. He took a shovel and some wood and he turned that little backyard into a mini farm over a period of years. Nothing was in a raised bed. Just areas sectioned off with wood borders and the dirt of the ground. He of course left enough grass for our favorite pastime of playing croquet. Before long, however, the gardens were filled with life: carrots, black-eyed peas, green beans, tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, cucumbers, onions, etc. He saved one of the sectioned off beds for Grandma to grow pink carnations, her favorite flower. Her carnations somehow thrived in that dirt patch, in long towering stalks and sweet smelling blooms.

Eventually Grandpa added a peach tree and cherry tree. The cherry tree was his true test in patience. Planted next to the old bomb shelter, it took 10 years for it to finally produce fruit. And the day it finally did, he came into the house so proud of his three little cherries. Thankfully, the next year yielding a better crop and continued to improve in the following years after. The peach tree? That thing was a monster producer. Peaches coming out of their ears.

Mom always had a house full of plants. I loved to help her water them. Every time we had to move, being military, she would have to get rid of her plants and then start all over again at our new base. When we moved to Riverside to be near my grandparents when Dad got stationed on a remote assignment to King Salmon, Alaska, Mom filled the house with plants once again along with Mexican pottery and a wrought iron plant stand (which I now have).

She also turned a small space of our little backyard into her own veggie garden. The backyard was mostly filled with a giant mulberry tree, but there was a bed along the cinderblock back wall. It was already filled with palms, elephant ears, bottlebrush, and other plants, but there was this one small bare spot where she could start her garden. Somehow she squeezed in cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers…and my pinto beans.

I was on a bean kick. In the fourth grade, our teacher had us grow lima beans to learn about the stages of plant life. When I saw how easy it was—marveling at my little bean vine in a clear plastic cup—I began raiding the pantry at home. Mom always had pinto beans for her frijoles on hand and sometimes navy beans. She let me plant them in the tight space of her garden and I absolutely loved watching them go from hard little beans to vines climbing high and producing more beans.

That didn’t mean I liked to eat them, however. My sister and I hated beans of any kind. But growing them was something different. It was in my DNA to garden. And I took every chance I could to do so. Soon, I was trying out other things. I found a tiny dirt strip along the wall on the side of the house and that became my own personal spot. I weeded it, planted in it, and watered it.

I stole a potato out of the kitchen and buried it. Next thing I knew, I had a plant that produced more potatoes. Wow! I dug them up when they were still small. How else was I going to bake them? Any larger and I wouldn’t be able to fit it in my Easy-Bake Oven that I had gotten for one of my birthdays. It took all day to bake them in that plastic little “oven” sitting on the carpet of my bedroom, but I was ecstatic while eating them like poppers when they were done. In my mind, I was a farmer. And a good one! Perhaps even a lucky one in that my bedroom carpet never caught on fire.

I even grew watermelon from the seeds out of my watermelon slice. I threw them in the ground in my little area, and lo and behold! I grew a vine! Every day, I would go outside to check on it. It started to snake out of the dirt area and into the grass. It was a skinny, weak little vine, but it was still a vine. I squealed with delight when a tiny ball of a watermelon began to form. I neglected, however, to tell Dad about my watermelon vine in the grass and he wound up accidentally mowing over it. That was the end of my watermelon.

I then learned about propagating from Mom. She taught me how to root cuttings from pothos, spider plants, and other houseplants. That’s why we always had a house full of plants. She would buy a couple and then turn them into many others. She also taught me how to sprout avocado plants from the pits. I remember our window sills always having glass jars or drinking glasses filled with water with cuttings and pits in them growing their roots.

When Dad got stationed in Hawaii, Mom found her paradise. We already had a tea leaf plant and coconut tree in the backyard, as well as a plumeria tree. The front yard was just a tiny strip of shared grass with our neighbor. Mom went to town on the front and back yard. Soon she had it filled with mock orange bushes, flowers galore, and even grew a large papaya tree out front. She started winning “Yard of the Month,” a reward given to the best looking yard on the Air Force base.

When I was in the military myself and had gotten married, Rob and I lived in our first house off base in Japan. It was a townhouse in an area set aside for American rentals. There wasn’t really a yard to speak of. Just a tiny, and I mean TINY, patch of grass right outside the front door. I don’t know if I was even supposed to do this or not, but I bought a shovel and attacked that small patch anyway. I planted lots of heather and put up the same sort of tiny white plastic “fence” border that I had seen Mom do in Colorado and Hawaii. This was before I knew I was pregnant with our Heather.

Then we moved on base and moved into a second floor apartment. Having no where to garden, I filled our house full of plants.

I didn’t have a garden again until we moved to South Carolina a handful of years later. I was in heaven! The yard wasn’t that big, but it felt huge to me. There were just a few azalea bushes and a mulberry tree in the front, and two bushes in the backyard. That changed real quick. I planted everything I could get my hands on. I grew wildflowers, roses, sweetpeas, gladiolas, poinsettias, cilantro, huge amounts of tomatoes, okra, marigolds galore and so much more.

Rob was so proud when he bought me a couple of large raised redwood planters so I could plant more things on our small backyard concrete patio—because I had run out of places to garden. We were so poor at the time, and the planters were a lot of money. I kept telling him no, but he bought them for me anyway and they made me so happy.

I made Mom’s salsa cruda that had people raving because of how fresh the ingredients were from my gardens. Rob loved making fried green tomatoes. Fried okra was a staple.

And this is when I discovered that my gardens were more than just meal providers and places for flowers. They were my saving grace.

I had suffered from postpartum depression. And when I mean suffered, I mean really suffered. To be honest, it wasn’t the first time in my life I went through such lows. I had always been prone to depression throughout my childhood and teens, and there were times when I was even suicidal. I thought that was a thing of the past when I became an adult, so it was an unwelcome development in what was supposed to be a happy time of my life.

I had a friend one time shrug after I admitted I had suffered from postpartum depression and tell me, “Eh. My wife had that too. She was depressed for a good three months after having our son.”

My reply was, “Lucky her. Mine lasted over seven years.”

That floored him. Yeah, it was that bad. I had three kids in three years and three weeks from start to finish. I was depressed after each one with really no time to recover. I wish I could say that I was a happy, healthy mom, but that sadly was not my reality. People didn’t really understand postpartum depression at the time because we weren’t suppose to talk about it. People were very judgemental, especially towards women who were expected to be everything to everyone as mothers. I was my own harshest critic and judge above all the criticism and tongue clicking about me coming from other women. And I had no way to express any of it.

Plus, if you read my book The Ghosts of Misawa Air Base and Other Phenomena you learned that the mother and son ghosts that haunted our home had a great hand in affecting my energy there as well. I guess you could say it was just a perfect storm. After Michaela was born in South Carolina, I just remained in a state of deep depression for a long time after.

Except when I was gardening. Somehow, the act of getting my hands into the soil would get me out of my head and into the present moment. I didn’t know what “grounding” was at the time, but that’s exactly what was happening. I was allowing nature to be my healer without understanding how or recognizing it for what it was. The more I added to my gardens, the more I was present. It was my time when I could step away from taking care of kids and household tasks and just be. Yes, it was work, but it didn’t feel like work. I felt that my gardens were giving to me.

People were always stopping by and admiring all the flowers out in the front yard. That filled me with pride to have had a hand in bringing forth something that gave other people joy.

When we got stationed in Germany—after Rob did a year in South Korea to get us out of South Carolina—once again we found ourselves living in an apartment on base. This time we were on the third floor. We did have a balcony, so I enjoyed sitting out there and looking out at all the nature around us. Curiously, every balcony had several planters hung on the railing, but it was winter so I figured I would plant things in the Spring. I guessed they were there for this reason and I was going to fill them with color even if no one else was doing so.

When our first Spring rolled around, I bought flower seed packets and planted them in the railing planters. Then I waited and waited and waited…and waited. Nada. Not a single sprout. One of my neighbors who had been there for a couple of years longer than us smirked.

“You’re never going to get anything to grow from seed here. Believe me, I’ve tried. The growing season is just too short. You’re better off buying them already grown.”

Then I learned from the base newspaper later in May that it was time. Time for the Self-Help store on base to do their flower give away.

Wait. What? They did mean for free, right?

I continued reading. Every year, the Self-Help store had free flowers for anyone who wanted them. Lucky for me, the store was almost right across the street from us on the corner.

I was there as soon as the doors opened the day they started the give away. Heather was in school, so I had Bobby and Michaela in a wagon and off we went down the sidewalk. When the doors opened, I asked a couple of German ladies how many flowers could I take?

They asked how many did I want?

I returned home with both kids walking and the wagon filled with tiny containers filled with baby plants of geraniums and petunias of all colors. After we got everything up three flights of stairs, I quickly realized the three rail planters weren’t going to cut it. That led to a trip to the base garden shop next to the commissary to buy pots. Lots of pots. I started buying the little potted tea roses that the commissary sold for inside the house and planted them out on my balcony. They got huge!

Before long, my balcony was a paradise. I had finally kicked my depression for good the year before we moved to Germany, but I still am a person who lives in my head too much (as a creative and introvert). If I’m not being creative with my hands—bringing my ideas into form—my thoughts can go off into dark corners that should be left unvisited. I can be exceptionally creative in my thought process or utterly destructive in my perceptions of myself and catastrophic thinking. It’s a blessing and a curse. So once again, I was finding my balcony garden as my place of therapy. My soothing balm. Nature healing me in ways that nothing else could.

Oh yeah. And I won “Balcony of the Month,” following in Mom’s footsteps. I had come full circle with family tradition. Being acknowledged was pretty sweet! It came with a plaque, a huge sign that hung off the balcony, my picture in the base newspaper, a personal parking spot in front of the BX, and BX gift certificates. No one knew that I really didn’t create the balcony paradise for the award. I would have done it anyway because that’s who I am. I decorate with nature.

Winters, as in Japan, were hard. Some people get SAD (seasonal affective disorder), which is caused by the lack of sunlight. For me, it’s because I can’t garden.

Then we moved back to California after Rob was medically discharged from the Air Force. Sunshine! Year round growing temperatures! Heck yeah!

After several years of living with my parents trying to get back on our feet, we moved around. At our apartment in Murrieta, I had our tiny patio filled with plants and baby citrus trees. Paradise!

At our next place in Romoland, we had a house with a nice sized backyard. They had it almost entirely graveled in, however. I took a shovel and hard rake and cleared a huge area from the landscaping gravel. I pulled back the black heavy duty plastic tarp underneath. I was going to have a mini farm, dammit. Just like Grandpa. Until I happened to look at our lease agreement and noticed the one paragraph I had missed before: Changing the landscaping is not allowed.

Oh shit. Rob and I rolled the tarp back down and tried our best to spread the gravel back out in the way it was before. Ugh. So Rob bought me some redwood raised planters to grow things on the patio. That was satisfying enough because the yard had a lime tree that took a lot of my attention anyway. It seemed like it was forever putting out limes. So many limes that we were having to give them away. Mom and Dad would come over and take home bags full. I sent Rob to work with bags of limes to give to his co-workers. We made mojitos. Lime cookies. Squeezed lime juice into everything. Served lime slices with everything. And I was constantly fighting the ants that covered the tree, which were going after the aphids that I just could not get rid of.

Then we moved to a home in Menifee, where we stayed for many years, the longest I had ever lived in one place at the time. It became my biggest frustration. The land was horrible. The dirt was hardpacked and void of nutrients. This was the desert of Riverside County, mind you. Outside of the green lawns and trees of the neighborhood were hills and desert landscape of dust and dirt. I used to joke that the area was eight shades of brown. The only signs of green on the hills and surrounding land came in the Spring if there had been rain.

Let me say, however, that I have never viewed the desert as ugly. There is so much beauty within those eight shades of brown.

I tried hard to grow things, however. But it was a constant battle. My tomatoes didn’t do well. Green peppers were stunted. Snails ate my strawberries. Even my grapevines grown in pots suffered. It was just too hot and too windy with those Santa Ana winds. No wonder the farmers who once owned the land—which was once fertile—sold off their acreage to developers.

Even though I was fighting against conditions out of my control, I have to say that it bruised my ego. I always had a green thumb no matter where I lived. For some reason, I was not succeeding here. The plants that were already established there did not require my care. They were tough plants made for that kind of environment. Just every now and then I had to trim the honeysuckle out front and the peppercorn tree.

I still sat outside when it wasn’t 110 degrees outside, but I didn’t find the same sort of peace in my environment. Only in hindsight do I now realize that I had also lost my own inner peace in those years. I was spending more and more time indoors, getting lost in thoughts and experiencing a personal crisis of sorts.

When we finally decided to buy our first home—which we found in Hemet—I was thrilled! It was in a new community and the house was actually built for someone else before it fell out of escrow for reasons we weren’t privy to. It was ours if we wanted it and they would include the upgrades for free as well as 21 months of HOA dues paid by the developer. Heck yeah! The home was beautiful. It had the largest yard I ever had in my whole life at the time, sitting at over 1/3 of an acre. It was the largest lot in our community. As Rob and I stared out at the dirt lot that was our backyard, we envisioned eventual gardens, a pool, trees, patio, and whatever else we could dream up. I wanted the place to look like fricken Disneyland when we were done!

We did put in a patio. We also put in citrus trees, a couple of pines, and a pomegranate bush. Rob and Dad built a raised garden bed for me. I planted roses. And I scraped at the rock-hard dirt to create a humongous vegetable garden. Oh, that was tough going. But I managed to clear out all the desert scrub brush and planted rows and rows of corn, cucumbers, zucchini, tomatoes, sunflowers, cilantro, green onions, etc. It was such a huge area, but I told myself that I would enjoy it until we needed the space for the pool I wanted.

Aaaaaand…then I got smacked in the face with reality. This is the desert of Riverside County. The cilantro was the first to die. It was just too hot and there was no shade for it. The citrus trees suffered and didn’t take well, even though Hemet is full of citrus groves. I watched sadly as the leaves turned brown, curled up, and died. The winds whipping through the valley windburned everything else. I don’t mean wind, actually. More like an evil force of nature. I watched one time as a freak monster of wind pick up Rob’s huge, heavy gas grill and slam it into the ground nearby, breaking it.

I did not account for the rainfall, or lack of, when I planned my backyard farm. This was during the time of extreme drought. Which meant every time I turned on my hose to try to save my gardens, I was running up hundreds of dollars on my water bill. Plus we were under restrictions on watering outside. Ugh. Almost everything that actually did grow was stunted in height. My giant sunflowers never got higher than my knee and never blossomed before they, too, succumbed to the heat and shriveled away.

As sad as this all sounds, I was still in my element. I discovered that my roses were thriving. So was the bougainvillea. Now I had a new focus. I would grow roses! Just like Grandma Lucy. I don’t understand how, but the second year after planting all the rose bushes and climbing roses was amazing. The blossoms were so huge that they were bigger than my hands. They were so numerous that they weighed down their stems. Their colors were vibrant and breathtaking. The bougainvillea became a monster, stretching across a wide area of the front yard like a monster octopus…its vines snaking like tentacles.

I did not enjoy weeding outside in temperatures that soared well above 100 degrees for months at a time. I did not enjoy filling my lungs with dust. Nor sweating buckets. Nor running from aggressive Africanized bees.

But yet, I did. Somehow, whenever I would go outside to do the tasks required, I would go out grumbling and in a foul mood because I knew I was going to be facing all these things. Then something would happen. Half-way through, my mood would be elevated. No longer lost in thoughts, I was focused on the present moment. Any thoughts that did filter through were quickly pondered and then released. Even thoughts that were darker were not allowed to sit very long. Sometimes I would go over something that was said or done to me in the past—things that liked to rear their ugly heads from time to time, usually preceded by some trigger—but then I would make peace with them and let them drift off into the ethers.

And it was then that I realized what I hadn’t acknowledged before, simply because I didn’t know yet how to articulate it into words: I did these dirty, sweaty, not-fun tasks to get my end result. A healthy garden. Which paid me back ten-fold. Gardens were my therapy and Mother Nature was my healer.

So now I’m in Ohio, having moved here over 7 years ago. With nearly 2 acres of land. And gardens galore. The elderly couple we bought our property from were avid gardeners and nature conservationists. They already had nearly 40 years of creating a special kind of paradise that I am now the steward of.

I had to teach myself a whole different way to garden. The growing season is super short here in the Appalachian foothills of Northeast Ohio. I had to learn what plants do well out here, educate myself on how to best care for them, and let go of my stubbornness to try to recreate West Coast/Southwest type of gardens. I’m sad roses do not do as well out here as they do in warmer climates, and I’ve had to learn to let go of what I want to happen versus what my environment will allow to happen. I have, however, found the next best thing that would have never survived at my last home: hydrangeas.

I’ve also had to deal with new types of frustrations. The woods are constantly trying to take back over the land. I have to compete with the abundance of wildlife for the berries and vegetables I grow and that grows wild, such as the numerous blackberry bushes in the woods. The weeds drink RoundUp like it’s Gatorade. It is a never ending battle to keep the deer from eating all my flowers. Raccoons like to raid the veggies. Chipmunks dig up my seeds. Old Man Winter doesn’t like to bow out for Spring. Just this past year, we had an unexpected frost advisory…when it was almost June! That had me scrambling to save the everything I had just planted.

And yet, I’m happy. Oh, believe me. My gardens have also brought me to tears of frustration from the sheer amounts of work, especially when things became very neglected from the several years I was dealing with serious health issues and recovering from procedures and major surgeries. I’ve cursed like a sailor. I’ve bled. I’ve been bruised from head to toe. I’ve been bit by spiders, deer flies, horse flies, mosquitos, and huge carpenter ants. I’ve been chased by yellowjackets and giant European hornets. I’ve slipped off the hill. I’ve ran over my own feet with my wagon.

Just this week, I huffed and wanted to throw in the towel before I ever began because of all the weeds…once again…growing in the beds. I had been gone for most of the month with Rob to Geneva-on-the-Lake here in Ohio, Philadelphia, and Cincinatti. So, I wasn’t able to keep up with everything. My veggie gardens in the raised beds suffered because we’ve had a lack of significant rain and I wasn’t here to get a hose on them. And those weeds. Drowning out all my flowers by the front porch.

Yet, once I started clearing them all out with my Grampa’s Weeder tool (the newest tool in my gardening arsenal), I was already feeling at peace and happy. Looking down, I could see the pretty flowers again and there was something so satisfying with having things neat and in order again. Just like my thoughts.

My thoughts can be so amazing. My head is where stories begin and develop for my writings. It’s where ideas come for an artistic or creative project. It’s where I envision things that I can try to bring forth into form in my environment. And this is how I’d like to keep it. When all that stuff is jumbled up in my brain, they need a healthy outlet. Otherwise, they will get stuck, stay stagnant, and then frustration leads to destructive thinking when I should be creating.

Gardening grounds me, helps me come up with solutions on how to manifest them into my outer world, and at the same time keeps me focused on the present moment. As with keeping the weeds out of the gardens, I’m learning to weed out the thoughts that will choke the life out of the things I do want to keep within.

Gardening has taught me patience. I used to be an all or nothing sort of person, and it still comes back from time to time. But now, I’m learning that it’s all about taking one step at a time. I don’t have to do everything at once nor do I have to micromanage my life. Like the phases of a plant, everything unfolds in its most perfect, unhurried time. You don’t pull up the shoots to see how your plant is doing. You leave it be to do its own thing.

The veggie and herb garden.

Gardening is about creation. I’ve grown cognizant that if my hands aren’t busy, I get into trouble. So now when I find thoughts running rampant in my head, creating a loop that I can’t seem to get out of, I get busy. If I can’t be outside in my gardens, I will look for something that I’ve been neglecting in the house and get to work. If there is nothing that needs to be done, I start writing. I swear, it works every time. That endless merry-go-round of horrors and compulsive thoughts are gone before I know it and I feel amazing.

Gardening has shown me how blessed I am and how I’m surrounded by tiny miracles every day. I feel rich and abundant just to be in the presence of so much beautiful nature. I feel lucky. Most of all, I feel gratitude.

This is the first year that out loud I’ve said that gardening is my therapy. I no longer feel afraid to voice that because I’m finding that so many other people feel the same way. Remember, I came from an era where you didn’t even say the word therapy because people would judge you. Therapy was the thing only “crazy” people needed. We just didn’t talk about these things.

Now that I’ve gotten old and don’t care what people think anymore—not to mention we’re in a day and age where it’s no longer a taboo subject—I say it with deep appreciation and gratitude.

A couple of days ago, I wondered what I was going to do. The snow will be here in just a couple of months. No more gardening until late next May.

Then I remembered my new She Shed. Well, it’s not exactly new. It’s our old enclosed pool area. The inground swimming pool died on us just a mere two months after closing escrow on the house. So it’s been sitting empty—save from a little nasty, stagnant water at the deepest end—within this huge retractable (or telescopic) enclosure the previous owner had built around it.

But the She Shed is new for me. For years, I’ve been frustrated trying to get someone out here to fix the pool for us. But this is Northeast Ohio. There’s only a small handful of pool people and they have either never given us a call back, have told us they have too much business and don’t need anymore clients, or they just plain don’t show up.

And for years, Rob has been staring at the pool area thinking, “This would make an amazing greenhouse for Chris!”

He even got together with his best friend and they plotted and planned on how to turn it into a greenhouse oasis for me. I, however, was stubborn. I wanted my pool, dammit! I had waited my whole life to have a swimming pool that I did not have to inflate and I had finally gotten my pool. Somehow, I was going to will God to send me a pool repairman.

God laughed and sided with Rob.

This year, I admitted defeat. Resolve to leave Ohio left as I learned to love where I live. Determination to be swimming in a sparkling pool surrounded by the woods left as I began to see what Rob and his friend saw. This empty shell of a place was going to be my oasis. Just not the oasis I originally thought it was supposed to be.

The pool area was where I was dragging my outdoor pots to every year, anyway, when we winterized the property…and my plants thrived inside of there through the winter. Well, that is as long as I could get through the many feet of snow to give them some water. But it stays warm and moist in there most of the time. In the summer time, it’s downright steamy.

Holy cow. I could actually start seedlings now for the first time and have actual baby plants to put out once it warms up in late Spring! I’ve tried planting seeds outside and they just get dug up by the hundreds of squirrels and chipmunks we have.

Yes. This could be the start of something really great. It’s going to take a lot of money, and a lot of hard work to get it to the oasis phase. In fact, she’s kind of downright ugly right now.

Future ultimate She Shed as the cleanup started to get underway.

But, I have been learning not to be an all or nothing person, right? So I’ve been making baby steps this summer. I started with a potters bench bought on a great sale from Walmart. I added a cheap Amazon buy, but nice looking plant stand. I have set up my tools in there. I’ve added little decorations here and there. Michaela and I dragged out the old pool tarp and got rid of it, as well as the pool cleaning tools and other junk that was in there thanks to 1-800-GOT-JUNK people. I’ve swept it out. I need to power wash the concrete. Got a power washer (now I just have to actually use it). I’ve put lime, orange, and lemon trees in it and they love the hot humid air inside of there. They are thriving.

And so am I.