After my mother passed away last December, I started working on a few different pieces that focused on her and the life she lived. I wanted to capture her the way I remembered but also the way she might have wanted to be remembered, which for me really meant trying to place her in the spaces where she felt the most at home. The garden in the backyard of the home where she raised me is one of those spaces.
“In Cause of a Messy Garden” tries to capture those moments, but it also connects my mom’s time in her garden with Camille Dungy’s new memoir, Soil. Dungy writes about her garden much in the same way I had often thought of my mom when she was in her garden. Reading Dungy helped me think more clearly about those summer afternoons when my mom would spend hours in the yard. It also inspired me to get a few of those images on the page—for nothing else than something to come back to and build on.