I just sold my house in Michiana Shores. Regular readers of my stuff here might recognize this as a big deal for me, as it’s a key part of the process of moving this publication, along with our dog Holly and yours truly, to British Columbia, Canada, where my wife and RGG co-publisher Ann awaits. Regular readers – particularly longtime regular readers – might also know that, over the years, I’ve taken no small amount of pleasure and pride in the little garden that I grew and tended at my now former Michiana Shores digs. I populated that garden with plants I raised from seeds, bare roots, or tiny potted nursery individuals, and I built, by hand, significant structures to make each of them happy and to augment the garden’s beauty and viability. I lent assiduous stewardship to the creatures – frogs, toads, birds, insects – that made their home among the ponds and planters and flowers and leaves and branches of the little garden world I created. And longtime regular readers who’ve read some of my more intimate garden-related pieces (missives?) might know of the connection I’ve felt, and still feel, to the plants and animals that live in my former garden – and to that garden itself as a whole.

It’s tough for me to actually see the words “former garden” spelled out in black and white, and it’s even tougher to wrap my head around the reality they denote…

I’d spent a lot of years in my former garden up to my elbows in dirt, on my knees, with that dirt ground into the skin of those knees (since the denim of every pair of my jeans had worn through). Countless times, one side or the other of my face got itself covered in that very same dirt when I pressed a cheek to the ground and peered down a toad’s burrow with one eye to make sure its way was clear and that its little bright-eyed resident was safe. The soil of my old garden – its Earth and its cradle – is as indelibly ingrained within the chambers of my heart as it is in the pores of my skin. My old garden’s nodding flowers and rustling leaves and spilling waters, its flapping wings, its hovering fuzzy and feathered bodies, its frogs in mid leap – all remain as a panoramic freeze-frame in my mind’s eye and an afterimage burned into my conscience. The arc of tracking sunlight across its green and multicolored tapestry is captured at every point in time as a curated collection of album-bound snapshots, locked away forever in the vault of my memory.

Although the profundity of unshakeable reality is irreplaceable at the sensory level, and there’s nothing quite like being there, the impact of my firsthand experiences in my former garden is never diminished. Their memories, in fact, are ever-resonant echoes that grow more discernable as history embellishes them with richness…

When I brought home my Michiana Shores garden’s very first plant – a tiny off-brand miniature rose purchased at a big box store – it was February and too early and cold outside to plant it in the ground. It remained in its pot – indoors until it was warm outdoors, and outdoors until its very own planting feature, my garden’s rose bed, was implemented – and something swelled in my chest as the little plant convinced me of its readiness for life in my old garden’s ground by its budding promise of first-time flowers and the straining of its foliage toward the sun.

The musical creaking of my joints as I rose from my hands and knees after I’d finished building my former garden’s first planting bed – its “Lily Patch” – was symphonic, and it accompanied their sweet aching. This live concert’s curtain call was the unfurling of nascent lily blooms, and its wafting encore perfumed the air.

I freed tadpoles from overburdening tufts of pond algae and I felt the pulsing of life in each little body I scooped from the morass. The beating of tiny hearts and the drawing of tiny breaths was the cadence of anticipation as these miraculous little beings marked a ceaseless march of morphological transformation from creatures of water to denizens of loam and breathers of air. I felt this in the palm of my hand – I felt this – and my heart beat faster for it.

My former garden’s residents each had a name. Mike, Jim, and Brian were the biggest, oldest frogs. Mama and Papa were the resident Northern cardinals, and Batman and Robin were the American robins who returned each year to nest in the arbor I built and raise their young. Big Guy was an elderberry bush and Frosty was a Japanese spirea. Minnie was my little off-brand rose. And beneath the inexorable light of the morning sun or the bronzed rays of a late afternoon’s nadir, I stood in my former garden and addressed each one them properly, and the gratification I felt was dizzying…

In each of these instances and at all of these times, I wished I was rooted to this little garden’s ground, just as its plants were, and that I could never be taken away.

But time has a way of marching on. The shadows lengthen in places like my little former garden, but with them stretch memories that span both the shady spots and the sunny, and eventually bridge them. In the dazzling light of a new day, a bright future for me is revealed. Fresh adventures in a new place with my life’s nucleus – my wife and my dog – are on the sunlit horizon. And here, new memories will be made. But I’ll never forget my little former garden and all of its living, breathing miracles. I know I’ll never again call out to Mike or Mama or Frosty, and I’ll never swoon and sway to the scented rhythm of my rustling lilies. I’ll not be able to mark the growth of my former garden’s very first plant – Minnie, the little off-brand miniature rose – in its indomitable quest for the sun. As irreplaceable as being forever rooted in the soil of that little place may be, the experience is not incomparable. My memories ensure this fact. The dirt, the flora, the fauna, the stewardship… they’re all there in the pores of my skin and in the marrow of my bones. They’re in my heart and they’re in my mind, and they’ll be there forever.

It’s not goodbye, and it never will be. It’s so long, old friends, so long. I’ll see you all again when I close my eyes. And I’ll hear your songs and breathe your scents. And I’ll always be richer because of it.