Rewilding Souls

cottage gardens and cottage souls

I always thought I was the kind of person who would like working in a garden, but I wasn’t sure. I’ve moved eight times in the eleven years I’ve lived in Atlanta. In between subletting summer apartments and living in guest bedrooms and those three decadent years in the dream house in the center of the city, the one with the view of the skyline and the backyard full of trees that blossomed in the spring, I haven’t collected a lot of junk (which is good) but I also haven’t had a lot of incentive to tend a patch of earth. It’s hard to think about having a garden when you’re impermanent.

Last spring, when I pulled up to Miss Mobley’s open house at the tiny brick ranch in the southest of south Atlanta, one of the first things I noticed was how much land there was - spacious grassy front yard, and a huge backyard with five ancient trees, water oak and tulip poplar and pine. The second thing I noticed was how meticulously maintained it was. It was so well maintained it felt fancy, fancier than a two bedroom 1950’s ranch has any right to feel. For thirty-one years, Miss Mobley had loved this home and cared for it intentionally and well. The shrubs were perfectly shaped. The lawn was lush and green and thick. There were no stray blades of grass or stray clover or stray bugs on any part of this nearly half acre lot on the unmaintained edges of south Atlanta.

It felt even fancier because it was the most meticulously maintained home in the neighborhood. My street has a lot of abandoned and overgrown houses, some of them with broken glass and taped up windows, weeds and grass pushing up through crumbling driveways while nature takes back South Atlanta, one half-acre lot at a time.

For a minute there, when I first moved in, it felt like nature was gonna take back Miss Mobley’s house, too.

I moved in April of last year, exactly when Atlanta springs into life. It happened so fast. It was a little horrifying. I had just moved and barely had time to take a breath and everything got wild and tangly almost overnight, bushes growing out and weeds filling the lawn and the back yard populating with BAMBOO (NO!) and small saplings from the trees and English ivy that I could not rip out fast enough.

All last spring and summer and fall, the garden and yard overgrew faster than I could tame it. I tried to work my way through my first ever chip drop (what a dreadful idea! why did I think 20 cubic yards of wood chips in my driveway would help??), and my shoulder quit, and spent a long weekend lying flat on my back on my yoga mat. I pulled English ivy off the trees, and my elbow quit, and spent two months wearing an ice pack. I got a lawn mower on Facebook Marketplace, which surprised me with a lot of smoke, but didn’t find a trimmer, so grass grew up through the edges of my poorly, half-mulched under-bushes.

Maybe I don’t like to garden after all. Maybe I liked the idea of gardening but don’t actually enjoy any of this.

One morning out weeding by the mailbox and chatting with my neighbor, Miss Betty, she looked wistfully at my driveway and said, “Thelma would have died to see that mulch pile, baby!” and I died, right there, thinking about letting Miss Mobley down.

I owed so much to Miss Mobley. Miss Mobley had loved this house so well for thirty-one years before she passed it on to me. She told me at closing that she had done one small renovation or improvement every year since she moved in, and you could tell. Miss Mobley had entrusted this house to me, and I was letting her down.

I bought during the wild housing rush in the spring of 2022, when houses were on the market for 24 hours tops, and when everyone was getting outbid by truly silly numbers, and when there were two houses in my price range per week that all got sold before I even had a chance to go look at them. The last house I had put on offer in for went for so much over listed price, and so much for what I offered, that I kind of stopped believing I was going to get a house, now or maybe ever. I felt overwhelmed and hopeless and helpless.

Then we showed up to this tiny, perfectly maintained brick ranch on the street with the overgrown lots, and I saw the tiny lake at the bottom of the hill from the porch, and I squealed to my boyfriend, you can see the lake from the porch! I could see the lake while I was writing on the porch!

My agent told me later that Miss Mobley’s daughter heard me. She told her mom that there was a young writer who loved Jesus who wanted to watch the lake while she wrote on the porch. My agent told me that Miss Mobley believed God wanted me to have this house, so when the higher, cash offers from investors rolled in that weekend - she turned them down.

It was such a huge, impossibly good gift from a woman of God that I did not even know. I wanted to do her proud, to honor the importance of the gift, to keep the house maintained and tidy and well-looked after the way she had.

Gifts are so good, but also can be a lot of pressure. Especially big gifts.

In December, I finally went out and got a bird bath. Just a big cement bird bath from Lowe’s, nothing fancy. But I had always pictured a birdbath in the middle of the lawn, and imagined a tumbly cottage garden spreading around it, slowly taking over all the grass, until the whole front yard was wildflowers and lavender and clover and roses. I was scared to start, because bird baths are expensive, and because I was still trying so hard to maintain Miss Mobley’s garden, Miss Mobley who had entrusted this home to me.

I went to Lowe’s to get gutter extensions and the birdbaths were on sale because it was December. I didn’t have the money for a bird bath and I felt embarassed about how much I wanted it but I got the bird bath. And I dropped it right in the center of the lawn, and put some mulch around it in a tiny circle, and - and it was good.

My longsuffering friends got a lot of birdbath texts this winter

And the house was a little bit more mine. I could imagine the tossly garden a little bit more. I stopped seeing the garden as unmaintained, overgrown versions of Miss Mobley’s, and started seeing it as the beginnings of my garden - my garden that I wanted to be overgrown and witchy and full of good earthy chaos and flowers and maybe even some weeds.

This year when I walk into the backyard, it is so much overgrown than last summer. This summer, though, I’m not comparing it to the way it used to be. This is my wild yard, and I wanted it. It’s not just “what happened” when I “stopped caring about my garden.” This is what caring about a garden looks like for me.

It is so lovely.

The back yard has bloomed into tiny violets in low spreading clumps, and leggy weedy daisies, and patches of clover that get bigger each time I check on them. The hedges are fully overgrown, and they don’t look untended anymore - they look like a whole different kind of bush, chaotic happy hedges wrapping around my house like a hug.

The intentionality of the wildness matters. I chose this. My wilderness is not a backup plan because I don’t have the money for a landscaper, or because I don’t have the time to edge the corners (although both are true).

I want an overgrown witchy garden for my overgrown witchy soul, home not just for me but for birds and bugs and spiders and bees. I want it to look lopsided and comforting, full of herbs and roses, wandering paths and stone benches.

It took a little while to stop comparing the old thing and the new thing, and see the new thing just as itself alone, without comparison and without the implicit judgment comparison brings.

Rewilding takes a little while before it looks on purpose.

***

When I work out in my yard sometimes, I still sometimes whisper a small thank you to Miss Mobley. I don’t know what she’d say if she saw my mulched up driveway and poorly edged clover filled yard. Miss Betty is right, that she’d probably be a little horrified.

It’s hard to hold gifts well and wisely, and also remember that they are gifts - so they are ours now, and we are responsible to our own soul for what “tending them well” means. We can honor the ones who have gone before, and be so grateful to them, and still - do a new thing. This is hard to do and still feel faithful, sometimes!

It’s also hard to hold the process well and wisely, because sometimes the new thing just looks like an overgrown version of was used to be, instead of the beginning of what will be.

Sometimes I feel like my theological self is in a rewilding process. For awhile there, I just looked like a shitty, overgrown version of my old evangelical religion. I couldn’t see it as a new thing, just a sloppier, untended version of the old one. Sloppier theology! Sloppier exegesis! Sloppier ethics! Take evangelicalism, and let it just grow out because you’re lazy and selfish!

I tended some well-maintainted theological gardens of some theological Miss Mobleys for awhile. I was anxious when I wasn’t able to keep them up, and couldn’t admit to myself that I didn’t want to keep them up. I wanted to be faithful to the tradition, and faithful to the ones that had gone before me. I didn’t know that faithfulness can look a lot of different ways, when you have been given a gift to tend.

And then when I finally started to release my grip on those ideas, for awhile it just looked overgrown.

It has taken awhile to recongize that this theology, this exegeisis, these ethical commitments - they aren’t “dollar store” evangelical leftovers. They aren’t just evangelicalism without integrity or hard work, or theology without intentionality, or ethics without sacrifice.

These ways of knowing Jesus are their own beautiful thing.

And it isn’t unfaithful to the gift, or ungrateful to what we’ve been entrusted. It is faithful to Jesus, and to ourselves, and to our own slowly-coming-into-focus calling.

**

I’m writing this on my front porch. There are no railings on the front porch, a cement slab painted a peeling rusty rose red, barely 6x12. My partner’s father noted that it is not up to code. Indeed it is not. But there is a row of dented planters lining the front of the porch, with spearmint and thyme and rosemary and some struggling basil and a single tomato plant (for my boyfriend, because I do not eat tomatoes, but sometimes love means cultivating plants you are not interested in personally). My feet are up on an Adirondack chair I found on the side of the road, discarded because it is split down the side, but it’s perfect for a footstool. It’s perfect for nights like tonight, when I want to sit with my feet up and my computer on my lap, watching the birds in my rewilding yard, talking to Jesus in my rewilding soul, watching this new thing unfold every which way.