When I spoke to the Moscow Rotary Club recently, I felt great relief that few in the room expected me to focus on professional gardening tips. Club members who read my newspaper column know I feel no shame about revealing my many blunders down in the dirt. Instead I told the group about my shaky start after moving to Moscow 11 years ago, when my husband, Lee, became managing editor of the Daily News. Soon after we arrived, I could sense Moscow’s charm, with its university campus and arboretum, Main Street shops and restaurants, and historical neighborhoods. But in this city of 25,000 people, Lee was the only one I knew. I’d left all my family and longtime friends on the west side, and shyness made me anxious about meeting anyone new. So I mostly hid out in the backyard of the midcentury house we’d bought, trying to rescue its neglected gardens with the help of an enthusiastic but inept crew: our two good dogs — and an unruly Maine coon cat named Benjamin BadKitten, who peed on my newly planted pansies.
Writing is part of my soul, I told the Rotary Club, but even though I was alone at home in those early weeks, I wasn’t writing, and Lee knew it. One night he asked me to think about writing a column for the Daily News. I’d spent my career as a professional journalist and nationally published author, but Lee’s suggestion nearly sent me running out of the room in a full-blown writer’s panic. Soon, though, I felt a creative spark: Maybe I could write a garden column for people like me, who found joy in our flower beds but knew absolutely zip about soil acidity or aphids run amok. I pushed past my fear of failure and submitted a sample column to this newspaper’s publisher, who signed me up as the Impetuous Gardener.
Writing a column helped me find a pathway to friendships and community. At the grocery store, people stopped to tell me they enjoyed my writing, or they asked about the BadKitten, or confessed that they, too, believed their pumpkin patch was cursed. I found sisterhood through conversations with smart, witty and warm-hearted women in our neighborhood. Lee and I joined a church, where I met more kindred spirits and filled another hole in my soul by mentoring teenagers here, as I had done in our former congregation. Soon afterward our son-in-law in Oregon accepted a job at a research center connected to WSU in Pullman. Now he, our daughter and four fabulous grandkids live just a few blocks down the street from us. Our daughter, Amanda Palmer, is a PhD student at UI and a Daily News columnist on the editorial page. Our son is a big-city guy whose painting business is based in Seattle, but every time he visits us, he sees that Moscow holds a certain magic.
After my talk ended, I answered Rotary members’ questions about my creative process, discussed the mysteries of growing tomatoes from seed, and joined a lively conversation about moose strutting down Main Street. I felt like a longtime townie when the group seemed to agree with my sentiment: Hey, Bullwinkle’s trespassing cousins — Don’t let the exit door bang your ample moosebottoms on the way back to Moscow Mountain.
Rozen is thankful that she and Lee have found their way home to Moscow. Email her at scraftroze@aol.com
