An Essay of Thanksgiving

One Thanksgiving morning, several years ago, I was in my kitchen racing with time to get everything done before hungry family and friends arrived for my annual November feast. I was listening to Morning Edition on public radio to keep me company during the early hour reserved for stuffing the turkey. The program host introduced a woman named Hilary Nelson who was about to read a story on gardening to honor Thanksgiving. A story about gardening?  That seems inappropriate for Thanksgiving, I remember thinking. But it was right on the mark. Here’s a portion of her tale of thanks.

I used to live in Hell’s Kitchen in New York City, and that’s where I learned how to garden. We lived on the third floor of a crumbling brownstone—the kind of place where the landlord has no phone number, just a post office box for the rent.

One day, some inept direct marketer sent me a flyer for mail-order roses.  I looked out my window at the empty, forlorn lot below me and then sat down and ordered three rose bushes.  They came about a week later, eighteen-inch thorny sticks in a plastic bag filled with soggy newspaper.

“What are you going to do with them?” my husband wanted to know. “Well, “I answered, “we need to build a box about a foot and one –half deep and a foot wide, and them we’ll hang it up outside the window and plant them.” “What we?” he asked, and started off for the lumberyard over on Tenth Avenue.

Filled with potting soil and roses, the window box weighted about three hundred pounds, and I was terrified that the people who lived downstairs might come out into their yard just in time to get flattened as the box pulled free of the deteriorating brick wall.  But it hung in there, and in June, pink buds began to swell.

Soon wonderful things started happening to us. People would stop me on the street. “I know you!” they’d exclaim. “You’re the one with the flowers.  Ooh, they are so very nice!” People would call up from Forty-Eighth Street, “What are they?” “Roses” we’d shout back. “Que bonita!” they’d yell. “Gracias” we’d yell back.

Eventually, my first floor neighbors moved out, and we grabbed their apartment sight unseen because those roses had made us so land hungry.  I planted nicotiana and foxgloves, columbine and ferns, hellebores and viburnum, all of which could thrive in the dim light of the tenement.  Woodpeckers visited and hummingbirds the size of bumblebees.

One morning, I found a hooker-junkie asleep under the gardenia on a sheet she had swiped from my clothesline. She was very thin and her pale face was covered with welts, which probably meant she had AIDS. “You got a very nice yard,” she remarked, “It don’t smell like the city. You’d never know somethin’ so nice was back here.”  She walked away swinging her skinny arms and singing.

It’s our nature to find joy in unexpected places.  Without this capacity, humankind would long ago have died out from sheer misery.  I don’t ever forget that there are hummingbirds in Hell’s Kitchen, that roses grow on tenement balconies, and that a garden prompted a prostitute to sing.  That is why I plant a garden. And that is why, today, I give thanks.

I was able to track down Hillary Nelson to express my thanks for sharing her story, and to request permission to include it in the book I was writing at that time entitled, Tending the Earth, Mending the Spirit –The Healing Gifts of Gardening. 
May your garden grow and your spirits soar. Happy Thanksgiving.