Heart Breaks

“Honey, the two things you love to do most will break your heart,” my husband once said. And he’s right. Last night’s devastation to my garden has cracked my heart, it is true. Snow covers impatiens, tomato plants, weighs down my snowball bush, tree peonies and Japanese maples and I’m left wondering what will survive and why didn’t the weather man warns us.

There’s nothing really left to do, but step back, regroup, replace the tomatoes and hope the rest of the vegetables will survive. The garden money has been spent—what is, is. And right now, I wished I had simple replaced the fall pansies with new, younger ones and have done with it. I appreciate pansies when the spring has been like this year’s.

Pansies are brave-faced, sturdy, beautiful and colorful. What more can I ask for? Pansies remind me of my grandma. She depended on them, too, and planted them beneath the fir trees in her front yard in the fall. Some winters they would bloom in the shelter of the branches even at Christmas. Remembering that, I started planting pansies every fall like hope.

Still, there is heartbreak in gardening. I fling myself into it every year, much as I do my writing.

I stood looking over the flower beds blanketed with the slushy white snow and thought how I’d just quit, stop garden plans and hopes, stop getting my heart broke, but I know that’s all frustration and lie. I’ll make do, make changes to those winter garden plans. I’ll edit out the dead; fill in with poppies or nasturtiums. Lo, and behold, come summer the garden will be no worse for the spring struggle and maybe, just maybe, something accidentally wonderful will happen.

This morning I can’t help but think how much in common writing and gardening have. There is the planning and the hope, the research and time put in. There is fitting the plants with the climate, sun and personal taste. There is the work, worry and tears, the back-pedaling, editing out what just doesn’t work or dies a slow death. There is the just perfect, most often from serendipity and there are the failures. Failures teach and break hearts. We start over, redo, rethink and …that is a better thing than one thinks.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough. —Bovee