Our Garden of Horrors

I've always been the type of person who underestimates the amount of time it will take me to do anything, driving the husband and quite a few others in and out of the family batty.

The hubby says I sound like our local Chinese take out.

Everything always takes "five minutes," from painting my office to frantically rolling out fresh pasta as guests are pulling into the drive, to grabbing a quick cup of coffee at my favorite cafe.

So when I teamed up with my pal and her sister this past spring, and signed up for a community veggie garden that was just five minutes from my house, I should have known that the three mile journey would soon feel like a cross country trek through quicksand and our gardening reputations would be muddied, forever tarnished by "The Great Abandonment Scandal of 2012."

 "Darling," the husband said in his clipped British accent. "Are you crazy?"

"Oh, for Christ's sake, I could ride my bike to the garden it's so damn close. Besides, Paula's office is a wink away," I said.

Like the hundreds of times before, he shook his head. "It's a stupid idea. You don't have time."

But we didn't see it that way. It would be our own little farming oasis. Our little patch of wonder.  We'd grow crops in artsy geometric patterns, we'd tie our tomatoes up with pretty grosgrain ribbon, we'd grow cilantro, jalapeños and tomatoes, so prolific our bounty, we'd be canning salsa for weeks, lining up the mason jars like trophies. Maybe we'd even win a prize at the county fair and get to wear a fancy satin sash round town. 

Our blooming plot of vibrant vegetables would be the envy of our new acquaintances,  a sturdy bunch of old Yankee farmers who eyed us with a peck of suspicion.

Maybe they'd present us with golden pitchforks and crowns.

"My, my," they'd cluck, "They should be in Martha Stewart's magazine."

"I can't believe what they've done with that patch of overgrown weeds."

"An epic transformation."

"How on earth do they do it?"

Where it all began.....

We met over at the community garden early one spring afternoon, the earth was just beginning to soften after the long grey winter,  and the welcoming fragrance of new growth floated in the air. Spreading stacks of seed catalogs over the rustic picnic table, we picked out dozens of heirloom tomato seeds from the evil sounding Black Krim to the happy go lucky Mr. Stripey, but soon realized even if we started the seeds that very day, we'd be lucky to harvest any tomatoes before Halloween.
 
We couldn't wait to get started. 

We'd throw apres work garden parties on the small common green, bringing yards of twinkling fairy lights, perhaps hanging lanterns, adorning the worn picnic table with vibrant colors,  artisan cheeses, grapes, baguettes, maybe even hire a guitarist.  I think we may have entertained making our own wine. It would become the place to congregate for evening cocktails and morning coffees. It would be an agricultural epicenter.

A farm to farm table success story. 

What we envisioned....

But less than a week later, as we lugged in our rakes and hoes to do a bit of pre planting weeding, we were met with a carpet of newly sprung weeds. These weren't your average nansy pansy whip them out with a quick tug kind of weeds-these were indestructible electric green matted monsters with roots reaching down to the earth's core.

I love weeding, really, finding it oddly therapeutic, spending hours squatting on my lawn, plucking out clumps of crabgrass. I've never met a weed I couldn't destroy. But these were hybrid warriors with roots of steel. They could star in their very own B horror flick, invading communities, covering homes, swing sets, bicycles, and unsuspecting suburbanites in hours. The weed covered folks would be frantically trying to find their pruning shears, but like most naughty gardeners, their rusted old shears would  be buried under a pile of clippings and they'd ultimately turn into human topiaries.

Would that be our fate?

Now, we gals are pretty strong. We do manly push-ups. And squat thrusts. In fact, in former lives, we probably settled the west, pulling the damn wagons ourselves.  Yet on that day, as we tried yanking out those weeds, sweat and dirt rolling down our backs and faces, we left defeated with only a tiny patch of our garden weeded, our knuckles bleeding, our enthusiasm dampened. Our fellow gardeners, with their wellies and sun hats on, resting on their hoes, had cleared what little weeds they had, barely breaking a sweat.

Had they known something all along?


They told us where to find a guy who'd till our plot for 20 bucks. He ploughed through our garden and once again we were planning our evening soirées, wondering how we'd hook up our fairy lights since there wasn't an outlet for miles. Could we haul in a generator? Hook them up to our car batteries?  Use candles instead?

What we thought it would look like....

We planted our heirlooms, our zucchini, kale, cukes, basil, cilantro, jalapeños, red peppers, green and yellow beans, and eggplant with every intention of daily weeding and watering. It looked so darn cute.

"Oh, we'll meet down here two or three times a week, bring our coffee and tend to our garden. It'll be a fabulous way to start the day."

"A great stress reducer."

"Gosh, we'll be down there all the time. It's so close."

"If it gets too crazy, we'll take turns."

We had it all figured out. We'd balance work, family commitments, and our own extensive gardens at home. By the middle of the growing season, we'd be knee deep in produce. We'd donate some to the food pantry, open up a farm stand. Be a farm to farm table success story.

But like most of our great ideas, (and we have many), there's just a problem called follow through.

We like to think of ourselves as industrious little percolators, pumping out one novel idea after another, feeding off each other's energy and excitement, propelled by our cerebral caffeine, but somewhere along the way we run out of steam.

Like the time we wanted to funk up the funeral industry with our fleece lined caskets. "Rest in Fleece" was our company name. We figured why would a manly man want to rest in a god awful slippery pink satin lined coffin?

Or like the time we envisioned 'active wakes." Instead of lying supine, the deceased could be waked doing their favorite activity, like fishing. Your uncle could be staged catching the biggest bass in his lifetime, dressed in waiters and reeling in that trophy sized fish, the sound of a babbling brook coming from an in house state of the art sound studio. Did your deceased love, love crossword puzzles? Your mother could be sitting by a roaring fire, (crackling noises courtesy of the world famous sound effects) finishing the New York Times Toughest Crossword Puzzles, Volume 8.

But then we figured we'd be putting our "Rest in Fleece" business out of business before it ever became a business because, well, it would be hard to fit these upright and decidedly stiff stiffs into our jazzy lined coffins. 

Plus we underestimate time. And we over schedule ourselves. And we move on.

Our daily watering never happened. The weeds choked our plants, squeezing the life out of our dear little plants, and started invading our fellow gardener's plots. It had turned into our garden of horrors. We'd sneak in at odd hours afraid to be seen as the women of the unkempt garden.

What it looked like.....

 The gardening police called.

"You ladies have to do something about that plot of yours. The weeds are spreading into other gardens. Have you just abandoned it?" Her voice, measured but dismissive, told me that our lease was up.

"But it was covered with those bad weeds before we even planted anything. I think we got a dud of a plot." I said.

I went down for the last time, on a blazingly hot day, determined to salvage our sullied reputations. I dragged my hoe, my pitchfork, and as soon as I walked down the garden path and spotted our little field of nightmares, I turned around.

Moments later, I was handing twenty bucks over to the till guy. 

No salsa trophies, no satin sash, no Mr. Stripey's or those evil Black Krims.

Not even a golden pitchfork or crown.

Just a few shots of our garden of horrors to remind us that sometimes five minutes is a very long time.

Don't Wake the Cade Sisters'

Three of the Four Cade Sisters

Sissy and I stood in front  of McVeigh's Funeral Home and eyed each other.

 "After you, Sissy," I said, waving her ahead.

 I figured she'd get the initial  blast of funeral parlor smell, that familiar but unsettling odor that curls up your nose, triggering for us, an avalanche of atypical funeral home memories.
And like all of the family wakes we've attended, we headed straight to the restroom to freshen up and do the pre-wake pow-wow.

Sissy lowered her head; her big brown eyes peeked over her funky glasses and warned me like only a big sister can.

"You'd better not laugh,” she said. "I'll kill you."

See Sissy and I have a little problem when it come to burying people.

We laugh.

It started with Great Uncle Snook Stangel and his cowboy hat.

Great Uncle Snook was married to Myrtle, a lively wide faced freckled woman three times his size. Her raucous laugh could crack a hundred double pained windows. The more Manhattans she downed, the louder she grew. Her infectious laugh would blow through the room like a giant gust of wind. And she made the best lip licking shrimp remoulade this side of Louisiana.

Like most people, Snook shrunk as he aged; losing what seemed like a good foot during the last few decades. Or maybe he was always that small. We Cade's are big boned can-do gals so we felt like Amazon wrestlers next to him. Snook was so tiny that he needed a booster seat when he motored round the city in his big three-ton tank of a Buick. He would sit on a tufted pillow, his little white head looking like the rising moon over the dashboard.

So when we got the call that Snook had passed on, there was a big "to do" because Snook was cremated and the Stangel's get buried, not scattered. But Snook was a white haired renegade and did what he damn well pleased and when we walked into the funeral home, Snook was resting inside an elegant and stately vase, fit for a giant.

But the trouble started when Sissy and I walked up to pay our respects to Great Uncle Snook. On the pedestal, next to Snook in the Vase, was a picture of him with a giant cowboy hat on. That damn hat just about swallowed Snook and if you know our family, we do not have an ounce of cowboy blood in our bodies.

And we don't wear cowboy hats.

That's when the Cade Sisters' lost control. Something about that big cowboy hat and Great Uncle Snook in the Vase triggered something primal.

And it wasn't pretty. 

We're not proud of our juvenile behavior that day. In fact, we were downright embarrassed, but since the Cade Sisters' have an aberrant acting gene floating around in our DNA pool, and while the rest of the Stangel's were overcome with grief, or catching up on the latest church gossip, no one seemed to notice that the we were howling as we stood in front of Great Uncle Snook's remains.

It's a good thing the Stangel's have bad hearing and eyesight.

Snook's cowboy hat started a pattern of bad burial behavior that continues to this day. And always begins with a stern warning from Sissy who seems to have very selective funeral home memories.

There was the Great Aunt Rally Debacle where my nephew, who may be following in his Aunty's giant footsteps, joined me as we walked up to pay our respects. As we knelt  down before Rally, I felt it coming, like a runaway train, building speed as my knees made contact with the prayer bench. Once it begins, it is simply unstoppable. Our eyes met in a cockeyed sideways glance. And it started. As I buried my head in my hands, my impressive shoulders shook. I begged Rally for help. Even Snook. Called upon God, Buddha, Allah, and Zeus.

But no one answered my distress call.

Sissy wouldn't pair up with me because she knew I'd jump over that thin line that separates grief from laughter. She was relieved that it was me this time, not her.

We recently returned from New York where we buried the last of the Greats- Uncle Len. Bless him, at 88, he was the baby of the family, and was our favorite Uncle. And throughout the four hour car journey Sissy reminded me that I had better not laugh.

"Behave yourself," Sissy warned.

"Hey, it's not always me," I sassed back.

"You started at Snook's," I reminded her.

"You did at Rally's," she said.

So as usual, we made a beeline straight to the ladies room for the pre wake pep talk. The Stangel's previous funeral home, Frederick’s ,was much nicer, plus they gave away those plastic nail files that you could push up and down, making a wonderfully addictive zipper-like noise. We still can't figure out why those skin color nail files were the funeral parlor rage, particularly since the metal tip was so damn sharp and who wants to pull out a file with a funeral home's logo plastered all over?

We paid our respects to Len, standing over the open casket, without any hints of laughter. No smiles, no side glances, no funny breathing sounds,no shaking shoulders. We didn't say he looked good, because well, he didn't and whoever caked on his makeup has a lot to answer for when they meet up with Marge Stangel.

Had we matured since the last family funeral? Had we finally outgrown the wicked bereavement behaviors? Cracked the Cade Curse? Would we finally be able to get through a wake or funeral without falling apart?

But then the priest walked in.

And all hell broke loose.

The thickly accented Priest called him Leo instead of Len. If their outrage was measurable, that side of the family would be multimillionaires. Heads turned, tongues clucked, but the little priest carried on with a wide smile stumbling over the virtues of a guy named Leo.

And that's when Sissy bowed her head, and her shoulders started to shake, like the rumblings of a great volcano.  Mount St. Sissy. Her face wasn't red; it was aubergine.  She was suppressing the monster of all laughs. Luckily, we Cade Sisters' realize our limitations and always park our behinds in the back row so Sissy got up, head bowed, her hands covering her eyes and walked out.

I knew Sissy wasn't grieving. In fact, I thought I heard the faint echo of a gasping laugh coming from the restroom.

Don't get me wrong. We love our extended family and these funerals are difficult for us particularly since we've lost the Greats in our family, a wildly eclectic, kooky bunch of  Stangel's. And we hate that we break out in laughter. But somehow, I think, the Greats are looking down at us, shaking their collective white heads, their soft blue eyes twinkling with delight. Because if there was one thing the Stangels' appreciated most, it was a good laugh.