My Hideous Garden Won Me a Prize

In Milwaukee, we have a saying used to denote a nonsensical statement. “Throw me a kiss from the train goodbye.” I thought of that looking just now at the title of this piece. It’s a painfully awkward title but it explains exactly what happened.

One morning last spring, I went to a Red Oak writing session. Basically the idea was to just show up, open your laptop, and write for two hours. I was the only person who came other than the Red Oak leader who greeted me and kept doing what she was doing. Should we keep doing this if it’s only the two of us, I wondered. Sure, she said. Why wouldn’t we?

So I wrote about my garden and failure, both recurring themes in my life separately and together. As is always the case, the essay started in one place and then went to France in that fabulous words-taking-flight way that happens once in a while. I got up and made a cup of coffee and then sat back down. I went to the bathroom and then sat back down. Each time, coming back, I’d remember something else, some new dimension of hideousness and I’d start to laugh in my head. This is a sensation that I adore – making myself laugh – it’s a weird little joyful thing. Once in a great while, I laugh out loud at my own stuff, the ludicrousness of a situation along with its trueness just being too much to take with a straight face.

Anyway, so I sent the essay I wrote that day to the Wisconsin Writers Association annual Jade Ring contest and it won! So I am the 2019 Jade Ring winner for humor which is pretty swell. There might have been three entries, two of them in crayon, or 5,000. I prefer to think the latter. In any event, my essay, Crop Tending, is included along with the Jade Ring winners for fiction, poetry, and nonfiction in the Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Journal of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters. Later in the fall, there is a conference where the winners get their prizes and read their essays. It’s going to be fabulous. Maybe I’ll wear green and have a flower in my hair.