To Plant a Garden

Note: This is a draft from March 2013 which I decided to publish 

I want to plant a garden.
As a child and adolescent, sullenly uprooted and dragged from house to house every 2-4 years, grasping at straws of geographic security, I gradually created a chant, half litany, half poem, which often ran, variation after variation through my head, growing over the years:

I want to plant an apple tree and watch it grow
I want to watch it inch its way up until the sapling stretches over my head.
I want to watch it thicken and harden until I can stand in the shade of its branches.
I want to watch the pitiful scattering of delicate blossoms which may come with the 3rd or fourth spring gradually explode into a haze of pink and white fragrance, like the recklessly combined bouquets of one thousand May brides.
I want to fill first bowls, and then buckets with apples, make sauce, bake pies, and inundate the neighbors with the surplus.
I want to stay in one home long enough to know if it's true when bulb-sellers describe their tantalizing packages of narcissus and muscari as 'good naturalizers'.
I want to plant a lilac bush.
I want to plant a fragile scrap of  lilac, or three in a group
French or Persian, or some enchanting Russian hybrid like Beauty of Moscow.
I want to water them through the long hot summers, and gloat over the lovely heart-shaped leaves in Spring, exult when the first infant flower sprays appear, and keep waiting and watching, April after April until the yard is filled with the massive adult bushes and the exquisite fragrance.
I want to plant a climbing rose.
I want to nurse it through its first seasons, wait the extra years for the first bloom, and feel no sense of hurry, because the rose and I have time, and no one is going anywhere.
I want to read manuals about pruning, toss them aside in despair, and train it and twist it, and bemoan it, until it is snaking its green canes over the roof like a flowering octopus, and I'm lamenting its size, vigor and thorns.
I want to plant a garden.