the garden

Everything in this place is gray and hard. The sky is turning dark, but more than that the very air is getting thicker and harder to see through. The lights on the street and in the windows slowly become brighter and brighter until they are what enables the seer to see.

I can't really breathe here. I never really could. As a kid I would ride the elevator to my dad's office, smiling past the receptionist, and bustle my way into the staff kitchen. I would heat up a mug of hot cocoa in the the microwave and do my homework in the waiting room among people waiting to get their teeth cleaned. Then they would step out into the hard gray air while I was still here in the filtered air, smelling the smell of teeth and cleaning agents. Then my dad would finish up and we would walk home, or take the bus.

My bedroom faced an ally where I could hear car alarms and cats. The sun wouldn't stream in through the window because there was a wall ten feet away that went up as high as the sky itself. The room was lit by a light fixture and a bedside lamp and the lights to my little stereo.

I moved away at twelve, when my parents got their divorce. My mother took me to the country, far far away, to live with her father and her sister. It wasn't really country, more a suburb, but it seemed like country to me. There was a brook. There were trees. By 8pm the whole street was dark - well, except for the one streetlamp. No hoards of people streamed the streets. No constant traffic noice, only the occasional passerby after dark.

And grass. There was a yard. A garden. My garden. The one I made and planted and grew with my wn two hands, to the amazement of my mother and the amusement of my grandfather. The one that awakened the interest in horticulture and agriculture.