After a while the soil sticks to your clothes and your skin, but you’re oddly proud. You’ve been thrusting your hands in mulch and fertilizer, flicking away the occasional slug, bug and–though you’ve been told they’re good for the plants–worm. You pack the soil around the base of a green thing, careful of the thorns. Every so often you stand back and gaze at what you’ve done, confident that by putting thing in the ground, you’ve made the world a better place.

How much better? Voltaire infamously ended Candide with a shrug: though ours is certainly not the best of all possible worlds, about the best thing you can do when bad things happen is go home and tend your garden–if you have one.

My mother had one. After a summer rainfall her rose garden smelled of coffee because she read somewhere that used Chock-Full-‘o-Nuts (the HEAVENLY Coffee, for those who remember the slogan) was a great soil enhancer. Our suburban house was on a corner bounded by three streets, so we had a little bit more than the typical quarter-acre and my mother planted it up, with a big circle of flowering annuals and perennials, a row of evergreens in the back and a few ornamental fruit trees whose rotting fruit stank up the yowling lawn mower that yours truly had to push once a week (sometimes twice in the spring and fall) while sneezing my guts out because I was allergic to just about everything that bloomed.

She even had a compost heap in distant corner by the neighbor’s fence where I dumped grass clippings, withered pieces of plants, vegetable fragments that weren’t good enough for the salad bowl and whole chunks of hedges that fell to the trimmer’s electric scream. After a while the pile would lose its fresh-cut chlorophyll aroma and become a darkening, malignant mound that gave off steam on cold winter afternoons, which, I was told, meant that all this organic matter that normal people put in the trash (except for the coffee grounds) was transforming itself into stuff she could scatter over the flower beds and around the trees next spring–with ground-up stuff that smelled like the wrong end of a cow from bags marked humus (not to be confused with the Middle Eastern bean dip).

Did the flowers bloom? I guess they did. Another of my sneezy outdoorsy jobs was watering them, after which I had to hose myself down because, as much as my mother loved fertile, loamy, fragrant dirt, she wouldn’t have it inside, unless it was in a pot nurturing a houseplant.

My mother became a member of the Pennsylvania horticultural society, attended the annual Philadelphia Flower Show religiously and filled nearly every horizontal surface of her house with plants. Some of those plants are in my house today.

And they’re doing just fine.

I did not inherit my mother’s green thumb. For many years I hated going outdoors because of my allergies. As I grew older, my allergies ebbed. I could survive the few weeks in the spring and fall with over-the-counter remedies.

Then I married my high school sweetheart, who, despite allergies, loves plants that bloom, especially roses. After buying a few supermarket bouquets, I went with her to a garden store where she took home a pot of a thorny bush called Princess Alexandra of Kent. This, she told me, was a David Austen rose, from the famed English rose breeder.

She bought bags of soil and asked my help putting it in the ground. Some of the dirt creeped under my fingernails.

The Princess, as we called her, did well for a while but, for reasons we still can’t figure out, perished. She was replaced with a Crown Princess Margreta and a Falstaff (both Austen roses). Both had slow starts. Margreta almost perished but Jan nursed her back to life.

And I bought more roses. We planted one spectacular bush called Tequila that became the marvel of the neighborhood. That led to more Austens (Windermere, the Lady Gardner, Port Sunlight and a few more Crown Princesses so we could grow them up our fence), a tree rose, a mini rose with small pink blossoms, a dwarf rose (a little larger than a mini) with orange blossoms, roses without names, roses found on a discount shelf at Home Depot, roses with such names as Paradise, Super Hero, Old Timer, Twilight Zone, Ebb Tide, Empress Josephine, Maggie, and Ringo Starr. Did you know Ringo had a rose named after him? We haven’t bought the Paul McCartney yet, but…

One rose whose name we forgot is now the Kai rose, for our grandchild.

I discovered I’m a sucker for plants with great names. In our garden is something called a Starship, a Turtle Head, a King Tut, and a Bengal Tiger. These aren’t roses. In fact, I’m not sure what they are, or what they’ll look like when they bloom.

But they’re growing and, a few days ago, when I was digging holes in the front, some people stopped and told me how nice the garden was. I invited their kids to smell the roses. “Always smell the roses,” I said, quoting a golfer who was actually misquoted (he never said anything about roses but, I guess when you’re a good golfer, people think you say marvelous things).

I stuck my nose in one of the roses and, though I’d smelled them many times, I felt like my grandchild when he ate ice cream for the first time. He said, “wow” but wow wasn’t enough.

After putting the gardening tools away, and watering the what I’d planted, I came into the house, cleaned myself up and watched the TV news. I saw terrible things happening elsewhere. If it isn’t violence, it’s horrifyingly bad weather.

We don’t get any violence on our street and, for reasons I don’t understand, the floods, tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes and forest fires have not found us. Several years ago a few feet of snow came down from the heavens. My back ached as I shoveled (a similar ache to how I feel after lifiting up big bags of ORGANIC garden soil) and I had that heartbreaking moment when I had cleared the driveway and the municipal snow plow truck roared by and put a new wall of white where I had briefly glimpsed the open road.

But I dug us out and we were okay.

I look at the news on TV, online and in the newspaper that arrives every morning, and I wonder, how are my wife and I so lucky?

Then we go outside and tend our garden.