The seeds of thriving
The thriving wouldn’t come overnight. It was more of a slow-growing plant nurtured by my wonderful therapist. And it is a still-going-on process. But at that time, her help gave me hope. I didn’t expect it to turn out as wonderfully as it has. Hope was enough then.
The help of my therapist, and the medications the psychiatrist prescribed had brought me back from the edge. The PTSD anxiety was coming under control. The depression was improving, though it would take a little longer.
The best way to show its progress was in from something I wrote in 2017, about a 2011 trip Ed and I took.
My book…
In 2017, I published a memoir, a collection of reflective essays, based on my fifty years of visiting a place I love, Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. It is a living museum…town, actually, the restored 18th-century, Revolutionary War capital of Virginia. To walk the streets is to be partly back in 1775.
In 2011, still climbing out of depression, Ed and I made an early spring visit there. One of the essays that later appeared in that book, A Colonial Williamsburg Love Affair: Tales, Takes, and Tips From a Lifetime of Visits, captures my mood at that time — the barren emptiness, the despair that there was anything more of value to come.
Yet, even then, the Universe sent its message of hope.
I’ll let the book excerpt tell the tale.
Chapter 9 – “Someday Finally Arrives”
Late Winter, 2011
The garden tour started in the David Morton Garden near Christiana Campbell’s Tavern. It was soothing and upsetting at the same time. While birds sang and quiet adults wandered the brick or gravel paths between symmetrically-shaped flower beds,
I wandered aimlessly, stomach knotted and muscles taut. I felt this edgy readiness to spring into action even though I had no idea what action I should be taking. The guide talked about why Morton planted what he did, and why colonists indulged in pleasure
gardens, but it was wasted on me.
I was unused to this kind of an activity at CW. My trips were always “child-based”—either me as the child, or then my son. And I never sat still for any of them. Quiet things like concerts, art museums, and garden tours I viewed as things for “older people,” things to go on a list for “someday”—some hazy distant future many years from now when suddenly I would know I was old, accept it, and do things for old people at CW. Given all of life’s changes in the last couple of years and how I was feeling about them, could it be that someday had arrived? I hadn’t expected it to feel like this. And I knew I wasn’t ready for “old.”
Our next stop was the garden at Christiana Campbell’s Tavern. This tavern had always been a treasured favorite of mine, so my hopes rose that maybe this garden would cheer me up. While the garden beds were attractive in their neatness—clean stretches
of brown that were spare and devoid of winter’s debris—they were equally devoid at this point in late March of much color. There were no flowers, no vegetables, not even green leaves. They seemed a perfect match to the gray sky and the way I felt…empty.
But as I followed the group a few of the guide’s words caught my attention, things about dormancy, growth cycles, rebirth.
We ended our tour in the Benjamin Powell House garden. This one was less a pleasure garden and more a working kitchen garden. This meant that for the moment, it was even more devoid of any obvious growth than the previous two. However, the guide continued on, cheerily noting that though the garden had been emptied of what had come before, rebirth was near as it was early spring. Even though the plant beds lay bare, beneath our feet roots were busy absorbing nutrients. Swelling buds were getting ready to shatter their seed coats and punch through to the surface. For a plant, this was certainly a time of tremendous upheaval. And it would be evenmore so in a couple of weeks when new young shoots would be up in the open, soaking up the sun and growing like mad.
It slowly occurred to me that maybe I was no different than those plant beds. I felt empty, but maybe I was really just dormant? Life had certainly disturbed and unsettled all the routines I had treasured and clung to. But could there be new shoots already at work smashing open some unseen emotional seed coats, ready to claw their way to the surface? Maybe in the near future they, too, would reach for the light and create something new and fresh in me?
It’s funny, but you do something you like for so long that you assume the experience will remain the same upbeat, fun, relaxing time that it’s always been. It’s just that that assumption is one hundred percent wrong. While life can remain calm, and even be
that way for many years, at some point it will change. I just hadn’t given much thought as to how. And I guess I assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal. But life brings its transition times, those moments when it is a time to take stock and decide if what came before still fits, or if it’s time for something new. Transition times require their due, and I have never been good at them.
By this point I had been coming to CW at various intervals for over forty-six years. Being a creature of habit and having had the ingrained habit of associating CW with “family” vacations for almost all of that time—either because I was a child in a family visiting there or because I was an adult with a family of my own—it suddenly shook me to realize that all was different now. My son was off to college, my husband had had a health scare, and I was reeling. I reached for my touchstone, CW, but even there it was
unsettling. It didn’t feel the same, and suddenly having the freedom to do what I wanted, when I wanted, felt disorienting…almost scary.
I realized it had been years since I had considered me, who I was, or what I wanted to do. What did I want? And to me, the most frightening question of all was: Would my most favorite place on earth suddenly no longer “fit me”? Was CW truly only a place for children and families and no longer applied past a certain age? I didn’t even want to think about that. But it was time to find out.
Never having indulged in a “just me” tour at CW since those heady days of ten-year-old adventures with my sister, I decided it was time to step out of my comfort zone. A new direction—a morning garden tour called “Through the Garden Gate”—presented
itself. I had been caring for our yard for over twenty years, and before that I had done a lot of vegetable gardening. I thought maybe something connecting my past with my present might feel good, which is how I ended up—with some misgivings and still feeling out-of-sorts—at the garden tour. It didn’t help that it seemed like the only others there were other “early-riser types,” (read as “older”). But I was glad I stuck it out. It certainly gave me hope that maybe CW and I did not need to part ways just because I no longer had a child at home.
I can’t say that the realizations from that tour suddenly made all things better. But in looking back on that time I am eternally grateful for it. That tour was my turning point, the beginning of a journey to a more comfortable place, a re-invigoration of long-shelved interests and projects, and a new and richer appreciation for all things in life, including, and especially, CW.
About five years later, we did another spring trip, though a couple of months later in the spring than that 2011 trip. This time I eagerly anticipated my visit, excited to explore some things on my own and partake of everything my son would have rolled his eyes at. That is when I decided I needed to revisit that garden tour. This time, however, I would actually savor some quiet time alone on a misty, gray, early morning, communing with empty garden beds and quiet, older visitors. To my surprise, the morning was flooded with sun despite the early hour. And the group was a mix of grandparents, kids in colonial garb, teens, and their parents. Could it be that all those activities I had judged as being just for old people were really for anybody, and always had been? Maybe my own perceptions had been my mistake all along. It never was about boxing things into separate categories of young vs. old, but about letting your soul soar in its own way, no matter the age.
Again, we started in the David Morton Garden. This time I heard how this was a formal garden, with a design adapted from one in Charleston. It was comprised of four quadrants or “parterres” and edged in boxwoods. All four parterres surrounded a covered well and pump, which gave the garden a hub-like center. When we turned into the garden at Christiana Campbell’s Tavern, I was awed by how incredibly lush and beautiful the young plants were. I don’t ever recall seeing such thick, green, ivy-filled beds before. And the vegetable garden at the Benjamin Powell House was in full growth—potato plants, Swiss chard, carrots, herbs, squash, all arrayed on a palette of green, spreading leaves.
Walking back through town after the tour, I wandered past swaths of vivid purple, neon yellow, and scarlet tulips, as well as blossoming pumpkin plants blanketing patches of earthy brown. Everywhere I looked, staff members were busy hoeing, nurturing, evaluating. Spring was in full swing and the foliage was richer than ever. The edginess and fear I experienced on that first garden tour were gone now, replaced by a sense of vibrant urgency—a desire to explore all the things I’d never had time to do before and to do it all now! It was such a rush to realize that CW was not just a place for children or young families, but indeed had something wonderful for all the seasons of life. I was just late in realizing that. But I was now ready to make up for lost time.“*
The bursting seed coat
I will simply note here that it was the dawning of the time of “New Directions.” Something within me was pounding at my “seed coat,” about to burst forth to better, healthier times.
I am seeking financial support to complete my memoir, work with an editor, and return home for fact-checking. Your help would mean the world to me as I take this step toward healing and giving voice to my journey.
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Soul Mosaic 
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