More than a few years ago, I got behind a mule and plowed up my suburban backyard. Okay, I really got behind a roto-tiller but my neighbors were just as shocked as if I had, what with the corn and 14 other plant varieties that quickly grew to maturity. You've never had fried green tomatoes until you've fried some up after you've just picked them. Forget what passes as the traditional gooey cornmeal and egg batter. There is so much sunshine and warm vitality coming from a homegrown green tomato that all you need do is flop it a time or two in cornmeal and then put it in hot oil in a cast iron skillet. Conducts the heat fast and evenly. I've made an entire meal of fried green tomatoes.
I've always been interested in gardens but more along the lines of the romantic overblown English garden. The rational logic of a formal French parterre leaves me cold. One garden that captures my imagination is the garden in the novella and movie The Garden of the Finzi -Contini's. It is the story of an assimilated Northern Italian Jewish family just prior to their unexpected deportation by the Nazi's. It is the story of afternoons of slanted sunlight and civilized conversation, punctuated with rousing games of tennis. Naturally, fine dinners of baked polenta layered with fontina cheese and salsa bolognese followed. All in the garden or in high ceiling, french-doored rooms opening out to the gardens. Can't you imagine the pale peonies in the cut crystal bowls?
But like most times of happiness and joy, there are sorrows which follow. I've done time in the garden. Something more like the Garden of Gethsemane. A place where the delights of earthy gardens and celestial banquets are entirely forgotten. A place where grief is like sweating blood, where the temptations of “what if's” and “why did's” lead the mind in crazy, repetitive circuits.
The older I get, the more meaningful “doing time in the garden” gets. Not easier but I know I will come out of it. Like there is a right way to suffer and a wrong way to suffer. To suffer poorly is to to deny it, to short circuit it, to not fully live into it. But the thing I now surely know is that it will end. The sorrowful mysteries will be followed by the glorious mysteries. And then the luminous ones, and the joyful mysteries. And the sorrowful mysteries yet again. This is what it means to pray and meditate on the Rosary. This is what it means to be centered in Christ.
For the everyday trials of life, I can go into the kitchen and cook and clean and relieve anxiety, especially if I pray while I do it, offering a prayer of the hands and the body, a prayer that sustains everyday life. For those times when I am doing time in the garden, fasting or eating very little is what seems to happen. But I know that the Wedding Feast of Cana is not too far off. That my wine glass will be full again and not with water. That Our Lord feeds us all with celestial food without cost. Beyond price. Beyond believing.
The author of five published histories, the Kitchen Madonna has also written for EWTN and has served as a director of religious education. These days, she blogs at kitchenmadonna.blogspot.com as she works on her forthcoming book "Kitchen Madonnas Everywhere."
