The Garden Gate

Son Douglas said he felt compelled to make this gothic style passage for me for my 60th birthday. I tried it in several different spots around the large yard we had on the farm, but no place seemed quite right. (After a couple years he came back and built a short fence for me and put up the gate.) I think he had a sense of the changes my life was going to take.

When Gail Sheehy wrote "Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life" in the 1970's, I read it avariciously. I needed some sort of road map for what was ahead in my life. Moving back to SW Iowa was something I was already thinking about. "Passages" helped foment my desire to do so.

Just as the book "Passages" ushered in the crises of my Dad's death and the upheaval of a move and change in lifestyle, so too did the gift of Doug's passage gate. My Mom died a month later triggering a deep depression in me that lasted for almost two years.

When we decided to sell the farm and move to Creston I asked Doug if he would like the garden gate back. He did and it now opens into his garden in Casey. (That is also when it became blue. Anyone who knows me knows I would never paint anything blue.) The fence around his garden isn't complete yet, but the gate is up.

Just the words, "The Garden Gate" invoke in me great possibilities: a doorway into a secret garden; a walled garden; a formal garden; an abandoned garden; a flower garden; a scented garden; a well-tended vegetable garden.

When I was a child, our garden was fenced. There was a garden gate. Maybe that is why there is a sense of adventure for me when opening a garden gate: Mom must have said: "Let's go see what we can find in the garden today."