motley (mot-lee)
adj. 1. Varied in color. 2. Composed of discordant elements;
heterogeneous; diversified.
For
years I’ve wanted to give our house a name. Although I remember
talking about it briefly with Matt, he has no recollection of it –
apparently it meant more to me than to him! But at the time, we
couldn’t come up with anything. But the idea lingered in my head
for a long time, and periodically I would try things out, but nothing
stuck.
Then
one day our neighbor lent me some of her favorite flower garden books
written by an English author, and I was once again inspired to start
thinking – obviously, English gardens and country houses would have
names, like Barnley Hall, or Cotsworth, etc. And that’s
when it came to me - “Motley Garden.” There’s an obvious
reference to the gardens surrounding our home. As
I walk through the gardens, there are so many memories – the
hydrangea by the door that was from Matt’s Dad’s funeral; the
crabapple trees from our neighbor who works at a garden center and
brought home the ones they weren’t going to winter over last year;
the bleeding hearts that I have loved since my grandparents bought me
a tiny one when I was maybe five years old; the humongous white
lilies that Matt and I picked out of a flower catalog years ago, the
peonies that we pulled out of his grandma’s back garden before we
rearranged for the fill from excavating for the addition, the
gooseneck from a past clients back garden (“Here! Take a shovelful
of this before you go! But be careful – it spreads!”); the
limestone walls built from rock Matt’s Dad and his cousin pulled
out of the river flats many
years ago when the MSP
airport was being built; the bridal veil bush that Matt’s
grandparents planted that we thought we’d have to dig out for the
addition, but didn’t; the oak tree we dug up at a friend’s cabin
when Owen was not yet born (Owen’s tree!); the red daylily my
brother- and sister-in-law gave me for my birthday (and the big red
one I picked out for myself!) It’s a very varied conglomeration,
but the joy of gardening to me is the constant and steady movement
and development and growth of all of the pieces, every year bigger
and more full, massaged and edited here and there to create a thing
of increasing beauty. It’s not a garden that was designed all at
once and installed, but something that’s grown over time with the
bits I’ve been given – it’s a motley
garden.
But
there’s so much about the garden and gardening that intertwines
with our life as a family. Not
only is the garden itself a calming outlet for me that allows me to
pursue a hobby without ever leaving my home (something which matters
a lot when you have a family that makes it tough to get out!) but
it’s also a picture of what it’s like to be part of a family, and
particularly part of a family like ours. Every
single one of us is growing, and one of my jobs as a mother is
tending these young little sprouts and guiding them to grow tall and
strong and true through daily watering, weeding, and sometimes
pruning or transplanting.
My
dad likes to refer to his grandkids as a motley crew, and they
certainly are – a many-colored, diverse batch of individuals –
sometimes truly “discordant elements” all composing one family.
Just like I enjoy my wild, fleeting, self-seeding (in odd places,
sometimes) poppies next to my steady trio of petite, well-behaved
golden-edged
hostas, it is the combination of all of the individual persons
that makes our family a
beautiful thing.
Our
family is particularly diversified with our mix of boys and girls,
Bulgarian-born and Minnesota-born, able-bodied and
physically-challenged, some ready to take on the world (by the horns,
for some of them!) and some content to take whatever comes. I like to
picture God as the Master Gardener who picked all of these many
“colors” and placed them together in one garden, and given me the
little job of puttering
and tending.
So,
we’re rolling it around and trying it on for size, but I just think
we might have a name that our home can live up to!
Motley
Garden.
(It
may also be worth mentioning that the last definition of “motley”
in my dictionary is as follows:
n.
An outfit variously colored, used by a clown.
Looks like we could make that work, too. 😏)
