Rules for Visiting

by Jessica Francis Kane

Midway through my fortieth year, I reached a point where the balance of the past and all it contained seemed to outweigh the future, my mind so full of things said and not said, done and undone, I no longer understood how to move forward. I was tipped backward and wobbly, my balance was off, and this made sense to me. A life seemed so long, I couldn’t see how anyone proceeded under the accumulated weight of it.

guardian and garden share a root meaning “safety, enclosure.” I had come home, in part, to help care for my mother.

To have an interest in gardens without gardening is like having an interest in food without eating.

Ask me for my biography and I will tell you the books I have read.’”

Many scientists believe trees can befriend each other, intertwining their roots to share resources and bending their branches to make sure each gets enough sun. Some think that a pair can become so close that when one of the trees dies, the other one dies, too.

2. I was interested in figuring out who I was with other people, and why that person was hard to be.

You grow up thinking it’s natural for the ones who love you most to keep their distance. Love stands apart; love lets you come to it. This isn’t wrong, exactly, but I wanted to learn how to stand closer.

Friends don’t have to be like seedlings placed at intervals along a border. It’s okay if they overlap.”

redeemable element game. On every street you try to find something redeemable, not in the sense of cashable, but in the sense of finding the one thing in your field of vision that either soothes or keeps you moving. I play it when I’m agitated.

“We take our friends as we find them, not as we would make them,” Samuel Johnson wrote.

A trip is a journey or an excursion, but it can also be a stumble or misstep.

It seems to me that your oldest friends can offer a glimpse of who you were from a time before you had a sense of yourself

what it is fair to ask of loved ones. Can we ask them to take care of themselves for our sake, because we love them, or is that an inherently selfish request?

Poetry only exists in a garden if it’s tended by the people who live there.”

People feel sorry for the house bound, but it can be a position of strength, a refusal to meet the world on its terms. Emily Dickinson was a recluse; she gardened at night. Emily Brontë, Greta Garbo. The recluse decides when and to whom she will speak, access is limited.

It seems the trees’ plight is to be always underappreciated by humans while working the hardest of any plant on earth for them. We cut them down, we poison them, we introduce disease and destructive pests. But we also plant them when someone is born, we plant them when someone dies. We want them to measure and commemorate our lives, even as the way we live hurts them.

‘Your living room is where you share the story of who you are.’”

“But you’re sure we’re not being slothful?” I told her avarice, envy, pride, lust, and wrath harm others, and gluttony is bad for your health. But sloth is just a willingness to move slower than others and that’s not a crime. I’ve always thought despair should be the seventh deadly sin instead.

Our primate ancestors spent longer in the trees than our relatively young species has spent on the ground and the trees still welcome us; they remember.

In bonsai you often plant the tree off center in the pot to make space for the divine,

The Japanese have a word for the calming, restorative power of simply being in a forest or among trees: shinrin-yoku, forest bathing.

Perhaps a best friend is someone who . . . holds the story of your life in mind. Sometimes in music a melodic line is so beautiful the notes feel inevitable; you can anticipate the next note through a long rest. Maybe that is friendship. A best friend holds your story in mind so notes don’t have to be repeated.

“Because certain things only come into focus when a person is gone. It’s sad but true. You need memory and loss to polish your thoughts. Otherwise you’re just writing a speech or an introduction or something.”

Rose keeps above her desk a copy of a photograph of French soldiers in World War I standing in front of a small vegetable garden adjacent to their trench. They did not have to build it. They were not ordered to plant a garden. I figured it represented for Rose an image of hope or optimism in the face of odds, but when I asked her, she shook her head. “It reminds me there is beauty in contrast.”

Why do I like gardening? Because I worry I’ve inherited a certain hopelessness, a potentially fatal lack of interest, that I’m diseased with reserve. Making a garden runs counter to all that. You can’t garden without thinking about the future.

Settle. The word gives me pause. You can settle a dispute and you can settle into a life. In its transitive form it means “to place so as to stay.” I suppose what you are reading is my attempt to settle. There’s a story I’ve been trying to tell, one about friendship and friends and what place they have in a life, and one I’ve been trying not to tell about my family. Does that make me an unreliable narrator? To a certain extent, aren’t we all? We don’t get to write from scratch the whole story of our lives. We are given certain plot points that must be incorporated. Maybe we settle when we’ve done the best we can. Is it real? I once asked Amber. What? she said. Your life! The things that happen to you. Is it real or are you just really good at making it all into stories? She said, I don’t understand the difference. —Alice

I believe my mother tried to contain her sadness by withdrawing and growing root-bound. When a plant outgrows its container and isn’t repotted into a larger one its roots grow round and round, halting growth. Just so, my mother got her children to the brink of adulthood, then her roots began to grow round and round, tighter and tighter. But mortals cannot decide how much pain is enough. So Atlas, god of endurance, punished her. Her pain grew until it bulged out of her.

Where was Eleos, goddess of pity and compassion? Or Artemis, reliever of disease in women? Or even winged Hermes, god of thresholds and boundaries, who might have softened her fall?

I can still hear my mother’s voice: “You’ll be fine without me.” Well, we are and we aren’t.

Ginkgo biloba is sometimes described as a living fossil because it is the sole survivor of an ancient group of trees older than the dinosaurs. It is the only member of its genus, which is the only genus in its family, which is the only family in its order, which is the only order in its subclass. That’s pretty lonely, which is why I think it should be forgiven the fact that its seeds when fallen smell like vomit.

The greatest examples of the ginkgo’s tenacity are in Hiroshima, Japan, where six trees growing between one and two kilometers from the 1945 atom bomb explosion were among the few living things to survive. The Japanese have a word for them, hibakujumoku, trees that survived the blast. The six trees, though charred, were soon healthy again and are still alive today.

Recently it has been popular to say that Emily Dickinson gardened at night because for a few years in middle age the sun stung her eyes. I feel certain it was more complicated than that. The woman was a recluse. Her garden was important to her thinking and being out there at night would have given her a chance to think while invisible, not just to the world but also to her family. She stayed away from people so she could be herself and when she was in the garden at night she could be another self, which is, interestingly, Aristotle’s definition of a friend. Something about the night work appealed to her.

When I’m doing well like this, when things are running smoothly and in balance, I wish my mother could see me. I wish she were sitting quietly somewhere at this party, just watching. I don’t want her to be impressed; I just want her to see how it’s possible to order a life, how it’s possible “to gather all accidents into our purpose.”