TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

If you’ve been listening to The Slowdown for a while now, you know I’m not a gardener. I famously have a brown thumb, as they call it. But to be honest, I think it’s more that I haven’t really tried. For as much as I love trees and appreciate flowers when I see them, I haven’t thought to plant and tend to them myself. For as much as I love fresh cucumber and zucchini and herbs, I’ve never planted them.

Lucky me, I live in a friendly neighborhood, on the kind of street where someone sends out a group text saying, “Hey, we have organic raspberries — who wants some?” A block over is a community herb garden, where one of my neighbors has planted basil, lemon balm, parsley, and a host of herbs in the treelawn — the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street — and anyone is free to harvest from the patch as they walk by.

I chose the right neighborhood for a plant-loving brown thumb to live in.

Recently I visited a close friend of mine in Chicago, and I was marveling at her backyard garden. My friend says it’s satisfying, the feeling of putting seeds or small plants into the earth and then watching them grow. I can imagine feeling a sense of accomplishment from that, especially because I would get to enjoy — and share — what I grew.

All of this got me thinking about what I don’t do, not what I can’t do. The truth is, it’s a little silly — and, more importantly, inaccurate — to say I can’t garden. I’ve never tried! I have definitely killed some houseplants, but I have no idea how a garden of mine might fare.

So the truth is, I don’t garden. Maybe someday that will change. Maybe someday gardening will call to me and be just what I need.

In today’s poem, gardening is exactly what the speaker needs.

Assistance
by Abbie Kiefer

When sadness settles
in, more intractable

than usual—
when it takes more

pains to make itself
known—

I tell my sisters not to worry.
I will garden the sadness

away. I decide
on a raised bed,

staining the cedar planks
I stack into walls

that form a new 
lack. I order

loam and compost 
the man with the pickup 

calls gorgeous. Do we decide
what fills us?

I can almost see it—
the dirt is deep brown

and clumped and it desires
to be useful. I find moving

it to be so tiring
that I can keep in my head

only the understanding
of the weighted shovel 

as I lever 
rounded mounds.

I tell my sisters
how I go looking

for uncommon
hot peppers. Three nurseries

in my gardening getup—
Carhartt overalls, frayed

Sox hat—
and at each place,

I kid you not, I’m stopped 
by a customer

seeking assistance.
Like the one wanting

to know how he can keep
his onions from bolting

and I’m sheepish and sorry,
having to correct him.

I don’t work here.  I don’t know
what I’m doing either.

"Assistance" by Abbie Kiefer. Used by permission of the poet.