Yesterday I missed a post…Again. The resistance got me. Writing at home is a constant battle against the powers that rail against art. If you’re the type of person that wants to complete some sort of project, whatever it is, and you’ve never had the gumption, motivation, discipline, whatever to get it off the ground, and you’ve never read Stephen Pressfield’s The War of Art, I suggest you check it out. Yes, he speaks of something called “the resistance” which is basically the internal battle within yourself as well as all the external distractions the world provides to stop you from being an artist.

I’ve battled depression most of my life. It was only until 2012 that I was actually diagnosed. I knew something was wrong and I needed help. I had gone through a tough breakup and was alone for the first time in seven years. The breakup itself was rife with drama on both sides. Luckily, I still had my old pal, my dog Clyde with me. In order to not be so alone I started working seven days a week at two different restaurants, the Ashmont Grill in Dorchester, and a new place in Milton called Steel & Rye.

It was a brutal winter. I crashed my brand new Subaru Outback while drunk. I had that weird moment where I was in a hospital bed, in a neck brace, looking up at the sterile hospital lighting with people all around me, sticking needles in my arm, flashing lights in my eyes, and asking me if I was ok. In the morning, when I got out of the hospital I had no idea where I was. I had lost my wallet. It was December and freezing cold outside. There was a commuter train a few blocks away and I had to beg people for the two dollars in order to get a ticket home. When I got back to my place, Clyde was there. Good boy, tail pumping back and forth, dancing, dancing and really needing to go out for a piss. He had been holding it in all night.

I was aimless. I had just graduated from a master’s program but spent no time writing down all the ideas in my head plaguing me. I thought about it and talked about it a lot but never sat down everyday and put pen to page. I came very close to going to jail doing several really stupid things. One of them, growing dank weed in the spare room in the house.

I randomly called a therapist, Chip, and only chose him because he was within walking distance. It ended up being a good fit.

Spring came, the piles of snow melted, and I was faced with my front yard which was home to five raised garden beds. I had built them upon request form my ex girlfriend to give her a hobby and get her off my back. Every year she was out there in the mornings tending to the garden. I sat there on the stoop smoking, looking at the beds and thought to myself, I can do this too.

It all began with an order from a farm in Maine that sold strawberry plants. I bought 25 of them online and they arrived a week later. There had been one day where a strange amount of foresight blossomed in me in preparation for all of this. The previous fall, on a whim, I had driven up to Allandale Farm and bought a bunch of manure. My compost pile had matured well and so I made this big mixture of the two in the trusty wheelbarrow, pulled all the ex’s old vegetation up, and slung the manure compost mixture all out with the spade shovel, spreading it out nice. On top of all of this I made a trip over to the park with the wheelbarrow just thirty feet down the sidewalk from the front yard and scraped up a ton of pine needles with the rake. No idea why this came over me. I spread the needles, along with dead leaves, on top of the beds to create a blanket.

When the weather got decent enough, I planted the strawberries. Just little brown twigs the size of a long finger. The instructions said to put them in diagonally a couple feet apart. I had one giant bed in the midst. A fourteen footer. They went in there. I also went crazy and planted a bunch of other stuff. Leftover seeds from the basement–radishes, tomatoes, peppers, beans, peas, sunflowers, melons, cucumbers–as well as potatoes from the refrigerator and two horseradish sticks I found wrapped in a plastic bag.

I had no idea what the hell I was doing but I went out there every morning, sat at each bed, and tended the garden. Hands in the dirt weeding, plucking out the weaker sprouts, planting flowers along the side of the house and the fence. As I worked in the morning, the neighbors on the street would come and talk to me.

“Watcha got there?”

“Oh, a little bit of everything.”

My place, a little two story townhouse with a front yard facing due south, was an anomaly ever since I had built the beds. We’re talking serious vegetable production here. All the other neighbors just kept their yards full of grass and the occasional flower bed. For the melons and cucumbers I had built a massive trellis as well as tent pole like formations for the beans and peas to climb. I had buried the sunflower seeds right against the front fence on one side, by mid summer they were eight feet high. The yard looked insane. Bees buzzing around, vegetables hanging every which way.

I went out every morning and collected strawberries. Those 25 plants were everbearing and produced mega loads the entire year. When fall and winter came and everything died, I repeated the same manure and compost, pine needle and dead leaf prescription for the beds.

The next spring, after the thaw, when I uncovered the beds, there was close to a hundred strawberry plants under the leaves. I had no idea they would survive the harsh Boston winter and apparently each plant sends out three to four, sometimes five, little runners, tendrils that spring off each plant and create another. I had to weed them out a bit by half and that summer my entire freezer was full of strawberries.

In the summers, when I was a kid, my grandmother’s go to dessert was fresh strawberries in a bowl of evaporated milk with sugar sprinkled over the top. In the winter, frozen strawberries in syrup, the store bought shortcakes with the nice divet, and of course, topped with Cool Whip. As a kid wandering the woods outside the house where I grew up, on Lost Nation Road in Essex Junction, Vermont, I picked wild strawberries from a patch up on a secluded hill in the middle of the forest. The little ones there were never enough of with the crazy flavor. Nothing else is so outrageously alien and simultaneously common. They say it isn’t even a berry, technically. Without strawberries would we even know what the color red really is? We certainly equate the flavor with the color. It’s still strange to me when I see them at the market. The smell, the odd texture, the penchant to overindulge or dip them in chocolate. They really only have one moment in which you can eat them, too green is a no no and they rot within two days of being plucked. Here today, gone tomorrow. Always available via hothouse but best right about now.

When I left Boston, my landlord asked me to get rid of the garden beds. I spent an entire morning that spring ripping them apart with a crow bar, and sawing the boards in half so they would fit into the back of the car so I could unload them into the dumpster at the restaurant where I worked. I saved a half dozen strawberry plants, however. Dug them out and gifted them to my next door neighbor, Clarence. He planted them in the fat strip of land alongside his driveway. It’s been eight years and I wonder just how many plants proliferated there or if they even exist at all, eradicated possibly by a lawnmower, boredom, a new owner, time. I want to think they’ll always be there and if I go back it’ll be the first thing I do. A little walk down Rosemary Street.