Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
The Hillery Beach Garden Club
There were many late night discussions as to the wisdom of including this chapter in our little book. The opponents said we were, taken as a group, too boring. The proponents argued that that was exactly the point.
In the analysis, we realized that it was the opponents who thought the proponents were the boring ones and the proponents had to formulate some sort of defense. Using this logic, we decided to include the chapter.
Hillery Beach is a quiet community tucked into a small cove off of Chesapeake Bay. The development has over 700 homes, about 50 of which actually sit adjacent to the water. Even so, the homeowners of Hillery Beach, all 700 of them, fight any waterfront legislation with the fervor of down payments and settlement fees.
The rosters of the Hillery Beach Garden Club include members with an early 1967 membership date. Although such folks regularly remit their annual dues of $50.00, none of us have actually seen any of these members in the flesh. For most, membership began in the late 1980s and attendance at the weekly meetings has been more or less regular. Thus, the active members of the club are well introduced.
Sometime in the early 1990s, the HBGC changed the club focus from snapdragons to butterfly gardens; from staked and pesticide-filled tomatoes to sprawling vines covered with Japanese Beetles. The pendulum had swung from the structured and classic gardens of the Jekylls, to the leisurely meadows of the birds, bees, and beetles. The HBGC followed the national trend and began to veer toward the organic and composted course that the horticulturists encouraged.
Bird watcherssoon joined the HBGC and distributed pamphlets on attracting birds to the gardens.
Soon the Tuesday night meetings were joined by all manner of folk and not necessarily those who could tell a tuberous from a fibrous begonia. The living rooms of the meeting sponsor would echo with the laughter of men seeking hummingbirds and senior widow ladies craving one evening enveloped by human sounds. The HBGC rosters grew so large that the meeting site was changed to the conference room of a local library.
For a two-year period in the early 1990s, the HBGC was a happening place. The meetings, at one point, became quasi-resident association meetings; far more community problems were solved at the informal garden meetings than in the structured resident meetings.
When the novelty of the garden-ecosystem concept wore off, attendance at the weekly meetings declined. Membership renewals were not returned. Over a two and a half year period, the makeup of the club changed from community social club to coffee klatsch for sufferers of hot flashes.
Not that membership of the opposite sex was in any way excluded--indeed, three of our most knowledgeable members are of the male persuasion and each lectures annually on their garden specialties. One quiet, pudgy male member is an expert of pollinating daylilies. Every year, the menopausal active members of the club gather at the gardens of the bloom-a-day-bulb expert. For two hours, our daylily sperminator demonstrates the delicacy needed to place pollen from the red stamen around the piston of the yellow one.
Cindy swears that the guy is perverted because he tends to stroke the piston for what she feels is an abnormally long time. We allow that Cindy is paranoid, as the daylily expert rarely spends more than fifteen minutes stroking each piston.
Some of our occasionally active members are senior citizen ladies who are welcomed with most open arms. We find these ladies excellent purveyors of garden lore and find ourselves better gardeners for their presence. Were it not for the ones who insist that all the national parks are being taken over by the UN, we would encourage more such knowledgeable ladies to join.
No mind the unforbidden male attendees or the senior ladies who beguile us with UN terrorist tales--the physical makeup of the more active members is solidly mid to late forties, healthy, hearty, and hale.
Most of the group is perceived to be intelligent, take-charge types of women. The occupations of the group include school teachers, accountants, school bus drivers, and bank tellers. All of the core group have children, most of adolescent age or older.
We encouraged all of our members, male and female, to contribute to the book. Indeed, many did. There became a need to edit the contributions that told of the joy of stroking pistons or the solution to UN absconders of our national parks. With all the fighting amongst our own core selves, we had to cope with the anger of those who waxed eloquently on piston-stroking--cut, but not pasted.
However, we have collectively accepted the responsibility of the grave task of this book and do not wish to be in any way held accountable for any national defense assault on our national parks.
Also, in so assuming such responsibility, we felt it fair to elaborate to a small degree on the overall character of the group, and to avoid the individuals getting in the way of our joint assignment.
One 48-hour session culminated in the joint decision as to the manner in which to convey the wisdoms and witticisms of womanhood. It was decided that narratives on the gardens would be presented as if the group, in toto, was the observer. This was not necessarily the case. In fact, it was never the case. The narratives were always and in reality, the observation of only one member. We decided that having a slew of narrators relating the many different incidents would be too confusing to the reader--what with the different types of yards and narrating techniques. Thus, each tale/story/vignette is related as if there was one group observer in one combined yard-ecosystem.
With the background established, we begin to enter our collective conscience and explore the agony of adolescence.
