Journal entry, 7/2/25: “It is startling to me how immediately and completely the garden has entered my life.”
It started with a knock on my door. Neighbor Judy, who I had not met before, was telling me someone needed to be in my back yard the next day to trim her laurel bushes. Then she asked, “would you like to join a community garden?”
In this new chapter of life-without-Joe, I did want to go back to the garden. I missed the tending that I used to do in Portland. I knew my new home had a mature garden that wanted attention, and I was planning to (literally) dig into that. But vegetable garden? Community garden? This was unexpected.
The first group gathering for the 2025 growing season was the next day at Judy’s place. And, I said yes. I said yes to little ones running around, to potluck meetings, to adopting the salad crop, yes to 30-somethings, 40-somethings, 60-somethings and 90-somethings showing up to work and weed and talk and dig, yes to sharing harvest abundance with the food bank, yes to singles and couples and friends and strangers, to new ones and old ones, yes to learning, learning, learning. And growing.
Dundee Hill Community Garden is a short walk from my little home, a place I had driven by for years, thinking it was someone’s backyard plot, with hoop houses and a brambly hedge you couldn’t really see beyond, fronting Hastings Road. And now it is my Eden.
I love the cycles of the garden. Reminiscent of Barbara Kingsolver’s “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle”, I have never eaten so seasonally in my life. When the lettuce leaf basil came on, I ate pesto. When zucchini came on, I made caramelized zucchini. When carrots came on, I ate carrots. And as my garden mates can attest, when the fruit came on, I made pie, torte, tart and cookies. It satisfies me to my soul to eat from the earth what I have watched become food.
And so, of course, the garden has emerged in my work. In May 2025, I started a new daily practice journal series in gouache and graphite, I call “Still, Life.” The punctuation matters. I am saying: after loss, life continues. It must. And it flourishes. It can. It is.
In the studio, the art journal entries are becoming paintings, working toward a solo exhibit at Aurora Loop Gallery in May 2026. It is pleasure to paint what I love, to paint what I am living, and to dig into the metaphor of “Still, Life.”
UPCOMING CLASSES AT NORTHWIND ART SCHOOL
Art Journaling in Community (online), October 27
Transparency Stars, December 7
Mindfulness Practices as a Gift to the Self, December 9
Make It Abstract, January 17 & 18
Paint From Poems: Ars Poetica, February 7 & 8