4
From my mother’s garden
With streaks of verdant green and
dots of blooming flora, few places
hold the same sanctity and beauty
as a garden. Gifted a natural green
thumb, my mother introduced me
to the art of gardening — she spent
years of her young life managing a
local greenhouse in a small Michigan
town, and her natural inclination
to grow and create never quite
dissipated. Her floods of floral
beauty are something for the world to
admire. Even in the rockiest soils and
under the harshest sunshine, she can
sustain gardens of intricate beauty
and careful curation. Asiatic lilies,
her favorite, populate our front yard,
as green vines of ivy snake alongside
our house walls and windowsills. Her
long days of planting ranging from
functional fruits and commercial
objects of beauty offer a moment of
peace away from a tumultuous life.
Her gardening — in every form — is
nothing short of an act of love.
On early spring days of rototilling
and dirty knees, my mother and I
can finally share the same language:
outdoor
planning,
plotting
and
scheming. I have never been as
naturally meticulous and intentional
as my mother — my brain is a
perpetual scatter of forgotten plans
and tasks — but the specificity needed
for gardening alleviates this. We
silently understand the exact depths
and distances between new holes dug
for fresh seedlings, and exactly which
plants should be placed where. This is
a delicate art; it needs an extensive
mutual understanding of how each
plant explains its wants and needs.
We can place our sweet lavender
bush near cheerful marigolds, but
know very well to keep onions away
from the nutrient-suffocating peas
and pole beans. Each year we spend
weeks together in this way — working
to create the perfect garden together,
one that is unparalleled in its beauty
and functionality.
To create our art, my mother and I
shop early in the season for a variety
of colors, shapes and smells. We share
the same habit of waking up around
sunrise, and this shared rhythm holds
out throughout this importantly
ritualized day. We eat breakfast, she
boils green tea as I sip on a morning
coffee, devising our garden-shopping
strategies. Together, we settle on
which store to visit, which plants
to keep an eye out for and which
annuals will grow back on their
own this season. During particularly
thought-out seasons, my mother will
sketch out her ideal garden on the
nearest napkin and mark where and
what will be planted, a soil canvas
she’s intricately designed.
As spring dissolves into summer,
the garden begins to settle into a living
entity. No longer restricted to our pre-
planned seedling coordinates, the
adolescent plants grow and spread
into a living, breathing biome of their
own volition.
In its newfound glory, our garden
turns into a ripe wash of flowers
and vegetables as summer arrives.
Through only light touches of tender
weeding and watering, our garden is
nearly a self-sufficient masterpiece.
The proven formula of flower
placements and strategic vegetable
varieties yields an admirable array of
floral colors and homemade salads in
waiting. After sweating through its
growing pains and need for constant
attending-to, my mother and I
have a garden to simply enjoy — to
a garden we created together. Soil
no longer needs to be washed away
from our hands, dirt picked out from
underneath our fingernails; instead,
our fingers exist to pluck vegetable-
shaped jewels from our garden.
In these long evenings spent sitting
near our garden, I am reminded
of just how much of my mother’s
daughter I am. We share the same
smile, and soon enough our laugh
lines will be mirror images of our
well-aged joy. Our foreheads share a
wrinkle of eyebrow-raising delight
as we relish in the sardonic gossip
we’re both eager to share within the
sanctity of our late-summer garden.
During these days, the sun seems to
shine upon us with extra brightness
and vitality. We share meals, slow
mornings and soft evenings admiring
our living work of art. As some
flowers begin to close and vegetables
no longer propagate, the season
of creation begins to halt, and our
shared language will begin to stutter.
At this point, it’s clear the evening
of the growing season is coming to
an end and we’re observing the final
inhalations of our garden’s breath.
As the hot summer sun slowly
sets into fall, our garden becomes a
dying relic of sunshine. Time spent
in the garden is close to being ribbon-
wrapped and put away.
The vegetables have completely
lost their numbers, and few flowers
make it through chilly fall nights.
Now is the perfect time to pluck
up the surviving bits of beauty and
immortalize them — together, my
mother and I pull apart lavender
bunches from their wilting bushes,
snip off the buds of black-eyed susans
and echinacea, and immortalize the
soft petals by pressing them between
napkins underneath a hefty book
stack. These small bits of petals and
buds are all that remain from our
garden as temperatures drop and the
world gets colder.
S T A T E M E N T
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4—Wednesday, June 1, 2022
Sitting back and chatting with
friends,
enjoying
the
perfect
weather and pleasantly buzzed
off of a watermelon frosé, I
looked around and wondered
why I’d never noticed this place.
I worked right across the street,
in the Kerrytown Shops, and
must’ve walked by it a hundred
times. It was secluded and quiet,
the drinks were good and the bar
served a mean brick oven pizza.
It felt like I’d discovered one of
the city’s best-kept secrets, and,
like Narnia, I became irrationally
worried that it would only ever
reveal itself to me again when I
wasn’t looking for it.
This, of course, wasn’t the case,
and the Bar at 327 Braun Court
easily became my favorite bar
in the city. But it took a couple
more visits for me to get over my
tunnel vision, which was focused
on Aperol spritzes and margherita
pizza.
Seven
buildings,
all
commercial
despite
their
residential facades, surround the
courtyard. On one side: the Bar,
Spiral Tattoo and Trillium Real
Estate; the four on the opposite
side are empty. As welcoming as
Braun Court is, it’s impossible to
ignore the space’s vague feeling of
lopsidedness.
During another visit one night
in August 2020, I looked up at
one of the shuttered buildings
and noticed the signage that still
remained. The house was white
with green trim, and a sign with
a bright yellow and pink logo
announced the space as what it
used to be: Aut Bar (named after
the phonetic spelling of the word
“out”).
I’d heard about Aut Bar. In my
second semester at the University
of Michigan, I made a friend
whom I, as a transfer who was
desperately looking for other
Queer people in Ann Arbor,
latched onto as something of a
gay mentor. She gave me two
recommendations for where to
find gay culture: the co-ops and
Aut Bar — the latter being the
city’s only gay bar. I should’ve
taken her advice sooner. Only
a
month
after
she
gave
it,
everything — including Aut Bar —
was shutting down as COVID-19
started to spread throughout the
country.
I hadn’t thought much about
the bar since I was made aware
of it, but I remembered seeing
on social media that it would
be closing permanently in June
2020. As I looked up at its empty
shell in August, I found myself
feeling sorry that I hadn’t seized
the few weeks between that
initial introduction and the outset
of the pandemic to experience the
bar myself.
AVA BURZYCKI
Statement Columnist
Read more at michigandaily.com
Read more at michigandaily.com
Design by Abby Schreck
KATRINA STEBBINS
Statement Correspondent
Design by Abby Schreck
A history of Ann Arbor’s Queer
spaces, from The Flame to Aut Bar