I hated to mow the lawn. I hated any kind of yard work growing up. Raking, bagging leaves, but especially mowing grass. So when Karl and I found the house we live in years ago and years after I had last mowed, my only concern about buying the house was the size of the lot on which it sits. Just shy of a half-acre, which is big for the city but not our neighborhood, the lot had a lot of grass that would need to be mowed. And I was not the one who was going to do it.
So in the separation of responsibilities that came to us with the ownership of a house, Karl and I easily fell into the agreement that outside was his and inside was mine. To my brief credit, I did mow a part of the backyard once as kind of a lark, thinking that maybe pushing one’s own lawnmower around one’s own lawn might be kind of fun. It wasn’t, and I never did it again.
Once, I was going to assist in planting some roses, I think it was, in the lengthy elevated flower bed that runs down the side of the lot over a low retaining wall. But before I turned dirt out of the garden spade three times in digging the hole, a green garden snake appeared. I screamed and ran into the house. You can slow trot me to Arizona, or at least Abilene, with a snake, and it needn’t be a cottonmouth water moccasin. I hate snakes as much as I hate mowing. I never turned a spadeful of dirt again.
Ever pragmatic, Karl decided to plant much of the bed with Asian jasmine, something hearty and attractive, but most importantly low maintenance. It’s fair to say being married to me is the only high-maintenance project he’s ever undertaken. The Asian jasmine thrived in that location, covering more of it than initially intended, and we just let grow. For years, it stayed green and glossy and was at its prettiest when a light dusting of snow would frost its leaves. Until the Great Texas Freeze of 2021.
Over two hundred people died while Ted Cruz went to Cancun (I just had to get that in). It was terrible indeed, in terms of human life and his bad optics. The Texas economy took a hit of around $100 billion, and closer to home, our ligustrum hedge didn’t survive and that Asian jasmine turned brown.
After three decades of thriving, it seemed that the jasmine might have met its match. But by spring, there were new green leaves growing under the carpet of brown. The jasmine was no longer thriving, but it was surviving. After striving through that season, the green carpet was back by summer, and moving forward to take over a bigger piece of the flowerbed that had been vacated by less heaty plants that didn’t survive.
In the past few years since the Great Freeze, I’ve watched the jasmine go through the cycle a couple of times now. For whatever reason, the tough winter weather of the 1990s, the 2000s and the 2010s never set it off, so I had just assumed that the jasmine could shake off Texas weather and its hardships without missing a beat.
Now I realize there is more strength to be shown by surviving, striving and ultimately thriving when the environment is so hostile that the cycle must be shown in the fullness of the spectrum of possibilities. Because we went through a pretty hard freeze not too long ago, the jasmine turned brown yet again, but it never occurred to me that it would not survive. Because that’s what the jasmine does.
As we approach spring, the green leaves are pushing out the brown ones, and I have faith that we’ll see our jasmine thriving again, just set back in the cycle that has revealed itself. We even planted some new jasmine—well, more accurately, we had some new jasmine planted at the other end of the flowerbed, and I trust that the jasmine will strive to grow together as part of the new low-maintenance landscaping plan.
If that works out, it may be low maintenance to us sitting on the patio, but the jasmine is doing the heavy lifting to make that happen. That intricate network of twining vines seems to be where the strength lies that supports the production of those green leaves that I so love.
Should there be such a thing as reincarnation, I would like to come back as a rich woman’s dog. Barring that, I’ll be happy to come back as Asian jasmine. It even sounds like a superhero, doesn’t it?
