Visiting my mother in Connecticut, I sit beside her recliner and she asks what I am up to. I tell her about Life Work. “I think your book will be inspirational to people,” she responds; she has been building me up since I was born; but she has her own ego: “When I look around this house,” she goes on, “I see so much that I have made. Drapes, curtains, bedspreads, most of the quilts. Not the blankets of course. Lace for the pillowcases.” She points to the drapes in the sun-room where she lives waking and sleeping. “I made those drapes in 1938 and the edges are all worn. I hope they live longer than I do.” After a moment she says, “I know the upstairs drapes need washing but I can’t.” In fact she cannot mount the stairs to see that they are dirty but she knows it well enough. Then she goes back to thinking of a life’s work, shaped into objects throughout this house. “They are mine,” she says.

All winter I find Jane standing by the dining-room windows looking into the secluded garden she has made behind the house; all winter she plans next summer’s back garden. On mild days in March she begins cleaning the garden patch for the better days coming; when we hear that the temperature will drop below freezing again—March, April, even May—she covers or recovers bulbs and emerging snowdrops with mulch from last year’s leaves. Snowdrops, daffodils, tulips, roses, peonies, hollyhocks, lilies. All summer she works every day that it does not rain, and sometimes she works in rain. She works on poems early at her desk, when the garden is wet with dew, or she might not write at all in summer. By nine-thirty or ten she is outside armed with spoons and spades, trimming and feeding, helping and preparing. On late warm evenings of June and July, only darkness forces her inside. She gardens twelve hours a day, some days.

And her flowers reward her work by their magnificence: peonies whiter than the idea of white and as big as basketballs; hollyhocks seven feet tall with a blossom delicately peach-pink. People swerve and slow down driving by, if they are flower people; we fear accidents.

I call it work and so does Jane although it is voluntary and produces no revenue—except when, in bare cold November or a rainy stretch of June, Jane writes a poem or an essay out of her gardening. Her garden is work because it is a devotion undertaken with passion and conviction; because it absorbs her; because it is a task or unrelenting quest which cannot be satisfied. True gardening is atavistic and represents or embodies or fulfills the centuries or millennia that her ancestors (all of our ancestors) spent working in dirt. Our forefathers and foremothers farmed not for pleasure but to stay alive or to satisfy the Squire, to survive on leavings from milord’s table or to lay up sheepswool and turnips to sustain themselves through the snows of winter. Whatever the source or motive for their work, the hymns of dirt-work continue their chorus below the level of our consciousness.