Gardening has been a pastime — time that I have to pass, to pause, linger, and appreciate what is around me — a healthy and gratifying reason to be outdoors.  It has preserved my sanity during the pandemic.  It has given me the ability to notice new things — to acutely observe, to see and feel the changes from season to season, month to month.  Nature’s way.  Slipping on my gloves, long pants, shirt, and socks with waterproof sandals (my protection from wandering worms, snakes, bugs), while plunging into the bushes, weeding, trimming, and planting. 

I have learned it all, done it for the first time with a consistency that I never had time for, nor the interest in.  What occupied my attention all these prior years, what was I so consumed with?  So much time in this house with this garden… or is it that my memory fails me, that the years blend together and these are the details that become a blur and fade into the distant past?

How did I not notice the dead blossoms on the azalea bush?  A 40+ year-old bush planted by the previous residents, in the middle of the garden, bifurcating the deep lot: the front with its more public facing manicured lawn, and the private area, beyond the azalea, where we gather.

For one week at the end of spring, late each May, I spend thirty minutes to an hour each morning pulling at the browned paper-like blossoms, dropping them to the ground, forming a brown-hued skirt of sorts below the azalea, sprinkled over the lush ground cover. Deadheading — a term that I learned from my friend when I naively asked her two years ago why the browned flowers weren’t falling off despite the rain and wind. 

The act of removing old blossoms so the plant can grow back fully – that is, shedding in order to grow.  Plucking the spent flowers, so the plant can direct its energy to new growth and future buds.

Like the shedding of relationships that have ended.  I’m learning to let go and allow myself to grow anew, to redirect my energy to new potential, tap into the unfamiliar, explore, restart.  With each pluck of the spent blossoms, I think of one more thing I am letting go.