Gardens are ageless. Gardeners are not. I know this because, unlike my garden, I am turning gray. The only time we look alike is in spring, when the garden gets dusted with lime.
One of us is showing his age, and it isn't the yard.
Did I mention wrinkles? There are permanent crease marks on my skin, which is beginning to look like an overripe apple.
How I envy the garden! It never looks wrinkled, though I have seen crow's feet from time to time.
I can spot the birds' tracks when I'm wearing my glasses. I've worn them a lot lately, to weed and to seed and to hoe between rows. The weeding glasses are one acknowledgment of middle age. There are others. I used to stoop to weed the garden, but now it's more comfortable to sit. On a pillow.
Once, I could work in the garden for hours. Now I carry a kitchen timer and set it for 1 hour. The bell is my cue to take a break, lest I KO my bad back.
I used to feel silly calling timeouts in the garden. One day I ignored the kitchen timer, reinjured a disk and spent a whole week in bed.
That's when I decided to practice safe gardening. After all, these are the gardening habits I'll take into old age.
I want to grow up like Curtis Wormelle, 83, who tends a small plot at a retirement village in my neighborhood. Wormelle moves slowly through his vegetable patch, examining rows of beans, onions and tomatoes with keen eyes and careful deliberation.
Wormelle has gardened all his life and says he can't imagine life without a hoe in his hand. "It keeps you busy and kills the idle time," he says. "I still need a certain amount of exercise, and gardening is a good way to get it."
You're never too young to be sensible about gardening, he says: "Seventy years ago, as a teen-ager, I sat on a stool to pick peas."
TC Kathy Yeomans, 45, embraced a more restrained style of gardening several years ago, after developing back problems.
"At first I thought, 'Oh no, I'll have to stop gardening.' But then I realized that there are other ways to do things," says Yeomans. "All I had to do was talk to older gardeners."
Here's what she found:
* A 96-year-old gardener who beats the weeds to death with his cane.
* A disabled man who scoots through the garden on a modified skateboard.
* An elderly woman, stricken with arthritis, who uses a large-handled Bowie knife to dig up weeds.
