|
Finding Eden
© by Mike Keenan 
The first garden was created in a distant place named Eden, and in that garden, our two predecessors, Adam and Eve, had everything they desired at their disposal. Let's sum up the resulting disaster by saying that Eve should not talk to animals that slither about on the ground. She and Adam were summarily kicked out of the garden, and the rest of us have been trying to replicate that garden in myriad forms ever since that rude expulsion.
I gaze upon the blue crocuses and pale yellow daffodils and vivid blazing forsythia that occupy my backyard, a colourful announcement that I had best start thinking about cleaning up the debris that remains from winter. And what indeed will I plant if anything to encourage my yard to look more like Eden, less like the site of a nuclear testing program. Some scientists have organized the physical world into hardiness zones. I think the same approach might be applied to age. Shakespeare described it best with his seven stages, comparing us to players on a stage with exits and entrances. We enter in stage one, that of the infant. 
Shakespeare is not kind with his first hardiness ranking, referring to us as "mewling and puking in the nurse's arms." Next, we play the part of "whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school." When I gaze at kids waiting on the street for their school buses in the morning, they appear like zombies, the living dead. Good luck to their first period teachers.
Next is my favourite part, "the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress' eyebrow." Remember this stage? In terms of hardiness, I would rank it quite high. In fact, we think we are capable of living blissfully forever in this stage, not realizing as we do later that "youth is wasted on the young." Shakespeare then compares us to "a soldier, full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard, jealous in honour, sudden, and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon's mouth." Merely watch one of the incessant Stanley Cup playoff games well into Spring and you will see what he means, particularly the part about the beard as the warriors forgo shaving and the increasing length of their facial hair reflects the number of games won in the playoffs, until those who remain at the end resemble mountain men, never exposed to civilization and its refinements such as showers and baths. Next comes the "fair round belly, with good capon lin'd, with eyes severe, and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws, and modern instances," wherein we resemble wisdom personified as we lecture others concerning the random truths that we have discovered, boring everyone to tears at cocktail parties. In the sixth age, we shift "into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, with spectacles on nose, and pouch on side, his youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide, for his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice, turning again towards childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound." Not a pretty picture presented by the bard, but it gets worse in the final act, "second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything." Yikes. Leaving Shakespeare aside, plant hardiness zones actually divide North America into 11 areas based on a 10 degree Fahrenheit difference in the average annual minimum temperature. This sounds reasonable, but when it comes to describing my garden, I prefer a more contemporary writer for its zone. That would be Rod Serling known for his live television dramas of the 1950s and his series called The Twilight Zone where anything might and does happen. In our twilight zone, Miriam and I do not talk to snakes, but since we put the pergola up, it has become our Eden. |
