I have a book I think you’ll really like. It’s called (as may be obvious from the photo above) The Late Interiors, by Marjorie Sandor, and it’s a love story. About a man. But also about a home and a garden.

Sandor is the director of the creative writing MFA program at Oregon State University, where I went to school, which means she was my writing teacher. Which also means I feel weird calling her “Sandor,” so I’m just going to go ahead and call her Marjorie. If you read the book, you’ll want to call her Marjorie, too.

So, let’s get back to that love story…

At the beginning of the memoir, Marjorie and a fellow English department professor find themselves walking by the greenhouses on the edge of campus on a winter night. They lean forward over a hedge and cup their palms to the glass. They find themselves drawn again and again to those greenhouses, and pages later we see them once more peering through the foggy glass, this time asking each other, as Marjorie says, “innocent questions,” like “Are those potato vines? Tomato plants without tomatoes? Is it all right that I’m in love with you?”

Soon, they find an old house not all that far from the greenhouses and begin to build their life together. From there, stories of the house and music and literature and love and parenting and illness and family are interwoven with Marjorie’s garden journal from that year. She devotes herself to planting and caring for the yard, and the journals are delicious tales of bulbs and bushes and soil and weather and the joy of staring at your garden for hours or tiptoeing out to the garden at daybreak when you know you should be writing or taking care of your husband and daughter but somehow you just want to weed in the chilly morning air.

The book spans from the summer of 2000 to the summer of 2001, and in the epilogue at the end of the book, Marjorie looks at her garden ten years later and sees how it has changed. “Here, at last is the wild and fully aged profusion I was so impatient for, ten years ago,” she writes. And with the changes in the garden, of course, have come changes in her life. The love and home that were nothing but “innocent questions” ten years earlier are now as fully aged and profuse as the vines climbing the garden’s back fence.

I loved the poetry and grace and honesty of the book, but what I think I loved most was just spending time inside the life of another garden dreamer. I look out at my little garden and am impatient for profusion too. And yes, my garden dreams are about getting my clematis vines to bloom, but that blooming is part of a larger vision and about creating a home and a life.

If you’re a fellow garden dreamer, here’s the link to the book on Amazon. Like I said, I think you’ll really like this one.