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The horticulture gardens at Virginia Tech served as a near fairy tale forest for the setting of this engagement shoot.

Marissa and Greg, thank you for allowing me to shoot your engagement photos. Best wishes for a very happy future together!

This summer I started a couple of “therapy” gardens. I have a dozen or so herbs, lettuce, flowers, and berries. I dig in them and bury my frustrations, sprinkling them with the sweat that drips from my forehead. Today, I’m not sure which was the most cathartic – the session with my actual therapist, or the trip to the nail salon for a bubble gum confection of toenails and fingernails. The sweet manicurist poured out memories of her great grandparents in Vietnam, intermitted with tapping my hand signaling a switch from swiping on the blushed glossiness from her slick brush, to sticking my hand under the dryer. She reminisced about memories of working in the garden with her staunchly independent grandmother, tending her coffee beans. A childhood full of single, independent  women who had become as strong and rich, in spirit, as the ebony beans they harvested.

I rarely get to water my gardens unless it’s after Milo’s bedtime. The frenzy of one year old insanity ensues with the turning on of the faucet, and he really can’t help himself.

He tromps through the lettuce, plows through the basil. I can’t get mad at him though. I just try to redirect him, lure him back onto the grass by changing the direction of the sprinkler. He’s sure to have memories of the water and the soil from this summer on. He comes from a long line of garden addicts from both my side and the Rasmussen side, it’s encoded in his DNA whether he likes it or not. My oldest has memories of working alongside my mother in her flower beds. Some of my fondest memories growing up are working with her in those same beds. Dragging limb after broken tree limb down near the pond. Her pyromaniac tendencies always led to the best brush fires.

Her gardens are full of the same tendencies as mine- borrowed snippets of starts to every imaginable flower. The soil mixed with years of determination and conversation with children and grandchildren. The little tow-headed toddler who used to poke at rolly pollies, following Grams around her yard, is now a sixteen year old who scares me to death navigating a car through a parking lot.

I hope they will someday find preserved in them memories grown from snippets of moments tromping through the vegetables, pulling up the weeds, and squishing the bugs.

Milo is four months shy of being old enough to attend our church nursery. There’s a whole slew of babies his age. I call us the hall wanderers. If he hasn’t napped before church, I often pack him in the car and ride around and he naps. Some days I drive around and look at people’s flowers and landscaping for ideas. Other days I admire the gardens at Virginia Tech, and maybe even steal a snippet of a flower or shrub to start in my own gardens. Today, we just toddled around the church parking lot, Milo picking up sticks and crunching leaves under his Crocs.

We melted and returned to the inside and sat in  the nearly empty chapel.  I imagined raising my arms and lowering my head and shaking it up and down  in agreement to a man out in the corridor who much too loudly spoke of his late grandfather. A man who apparently had been so practical in one sense that he only owned two shirts and two pairs of pants, yet who was so indulgent with other poisons of life that “he drank so much alcohol, he was a walking wick!” Amen, brother, amen.  I don’t judge, I just understand. I’ve heard a few stories here and there in very little detail of one of my own grandfathers who also escaped that way. Knowing some of the heartache he saw, I can’t blame him, I praise him for even going on after tragedies he faced in his young family.  I look for an escape myself. Milo and I escape the confines of the pews and testimonies by running through the parking lot or driving around town. I escape in trying my hand at photography, sometimes I escape to the bathroom floor in tears. We all do it. We all look for our fix. We all escape to try to find ourselves. I try to find a place to go, but I can’t escape myself staring back in this little guy’s face.