Sanctum sanctorum

Do you want these? My dad asked, gesturing at the ground around his pool.

I’ve been trying to be better about taking anything that’s otherwise headed to the trash. But beneath our feet were smooth slabs of bluestone etched with a patina of lichen. Dad and his wife were replacing them with sandstone pavers that didn’t get as hot underfoot in the sun.

What I would do with them, I didn’t yet know. But yep, I wanted them.

Transporting a ton of rock from east of the Hudson to west of the Delaware was another story. Each time we visited Dad, I’d pile as many slabs as I dared into my trunk, depending on who was looking. (Husband Joe errs on the side of safety, while I favor the frisson of a close call – a not-broken axle, an incredibly un-shattered back windshield.)

Back home, Joe stacked the bluestone outside the garage and I pondered possibilities. Floor tiles of a garden shed? But as weeks turned into months and the slag heap sat gathering chicken poop, I reconciled myself to the reality that I might be a decade older by the time a structure manifested itself.

So one day last spring, I started carrying the slabs over to garden three – the wildest garden – and laying them down, one after another.

Joe advised the use of a wheelbarrow. Remember the wheel, that Stone Age invention dreamt up for just this purpose? I could feel him thinking. Sound advice, which as usual I ignored. I wanted to tap into instinct for this project. Sometimes (gasp!) I didn’t even wear work gloves.

I placed the stones in the line of the path my feet knew by heart. It was the circuit I’d walked daily the previous fall, tiptoeing along the fence-line where volunteer tomatoes and poison ivy ran riot, high-stepping over squash vines as if dodging invisible trip wires. The kids rarely followed on my harvest loop. It was too hairy, even for my nimble-footed helpers. Only I knew where to step, boots placed directly in the depressions left by my boots the day before.

Until now.

Now, with each stone I laid down, my footsteps were made manifest. The bluestones marked the way, crushing prickers and poison ivy underneath them. For the first time in my life, my garden was not just going to be productive, but welcoming.

If you build it... Yep! The path was no more than a semi-circle when the littles materialized, hopscotching, embellishing the slabs with chalk rainbows and games of tic-tac-toe. Overnight, what had been my solitary outpost turned into our family hangout.

Even Joe got inspired, banging together the hoop house I’d mentioned as a long-term wish list item – a structure, after all! A bench appeared, alongside which I rolled my heaviest-ever impulse buy, a monumental planter big enough to fit a small child comfortably. What? It had spoken to me at Lowe’s.

They say progress begets progress, and sure enough, in this little corner of our world, we were on a roll. Joe hung wire shelves in the hoop house and voila, a place to put my coffee mug, seedlings, sidewalk chalk, the toy crossbow left out in the yard.

By the time I brought home the next load of bluestone, my one-woman crusade had become a family affair. Schlepping a flagstone, I looked up to see the littles had each grabbed a piece, and were carrying them to the end of the unfinished loop. Leave ’em! I grunted, anticipating crushed fingers. But just as I’d ignored Joe’s wheelbarrow suggestion, they paid me no mind.

Some irresistible momentum was mounting. Like worker ants, the littles followed each other, laying down piece after piece in the line that had by now become clear. Before long, the bluestone pile – which had seemed so perilously massive as it shifted in my trunk – was nearly gone. Maybe it would require another trip to Dad’s before we finished our loop, and (I told myself) that was okay. Patience.

Put a little more space between them, advised Juno, my mini mathematician. So I dragged the stones further apart. Hoisting the last slab, I staggered my way to the far end of the garden, dropped it... and our two sides met. There was but one thing left to do. We kicked off our shoes and started running the harvest loop, the bluestones warm and smooth beneath our feet.

It’s been a year since we laid that path, and garden three is now the spot. Its wilds are less wild, thanks to weed whacker and woodchips, and Juno and I have big ideas about putting a table out there – table to farm! Even my no fighting in the garden rule (a hail Mary, to be honest) is acknowledged, if not always followed. The hoop house, a simple assemblage of cattle panels and a plastic sheet, has come to feel like my sanctuary, a bubble of stillness no matter how fast the world outside is spinning.

I visit the hoop house daily, often twice a day, to water and harvest, but also to call a kind of cosmic time-out. Here, in what I’ve begun to think of as my inner sanctum, my sanctum sanctorum, I am blessedly unreachable. My mind is free to notice: a shed snakeskin, the first tendrils of a pumpkin plant twining around the wire structure, bracing to pull. Even the kids don’t know where I am, though soon enough they’ll find me.

And when they do, something about the intimacy of the space – just us and the plants – often inspires them to let their thoughts meander. Squatting to pinch peas from the vine, if my little garden companion feels moved to go stream of consciousness, for once, I’m in the opposite of a hurry. I might even take a seat on the bluestone, weeding, until we get called in for dinner.