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Life in Sue's garden continues even when I'm not
paying attention.
The sun peels paint off the gate to my room. When
I water, ants surge out of a crack caused by an
earthquake, schlep crumbs from my biscotti down
an aisle of bricks, like participants in a wedding
parade, or like they're trying to find their way
back to Argentina. Ants guarding their eggs in a
flood are each a lioness staving off hyenas.
Butterflies come in droves to pry secrets from
the bougainvillea. Blue jays demand peanuts to bury
on the slope a block away, where a man who lives
with his mother plants seeds and shrubbery to keep
The 10 from slipping.
When I first saw the garden, it was May, and I
thought to myself how lovely it would be to live
in the little room it guards. The dragonfly lights
were on, and I sipped an iced cold drink and told
Sweet Meg about how my grandmother had also had
cancer. I told her I could write poetry from that
little room.
So, when my scar had diminished to a hair thin
line, and when my fractured ankle decided to release
me to the dance floors again, I moved in.
I have tea in the garden almost every morning.
I push back the French doors, step onto the concrete,
sit at the glass-topped table, and sip. Slowly.
Just watching the garden watching me. The tiny fans
of irises poking through to vouch their survival.
The white stone peacock pretending to be coy. The
spider that relocates its four foot web every night
so I have to tilt my head every day to search for
the reflection of morning
light on strands that seem to have caught my dreams.
Mosquito larvae wriggle in the clam shaped pool
of a fountain that hasn't been turned on in three
years. In summer, I scooped them out with real shells
Sue collected from yard sales and friends. Supposedly,
they die soon after hitting the ground. I feel no
guilt, rather curiosity and the fuzz of Georgia
peaches when I was twelve.
A rat came at night once, foraging through the
thick woody vines that bridge the roof of my room
and the neighbor's fence, the one behind the fig
tree. In September, we picked seventeen figs the
birds didn't get.
Once every two to six weeks, depending on the season,
and Sue's tips, the Mexican gardener brothers or
cousins come to whack and rake. They live two doors
down and venture here after their exhausting day
jobs to slash dandelions and five kinds of grass
that grow at different speeds. You'd never know
by looking at their yard that a dozen people live
in that house. It's as manicured and tidy as Les
Tuilleries.
I think about France, and recite words like ‘jardin’
and ‘fleur’. Sip my tea, and await the
morning doves.
A shiny blue metallic ball shows the sun's passage.
I navigate it carefully as though it were my own
private ocean.
The hummingbirds come so close to the Christmas
cactus I've hauled around for ten years. So close
I can touch them. But I don't want to touch them,
because I don't want them ever to leave. They hover
awhile, then zip off to the trellis that holds pink
roses in summer. Sometimes they just sit on a branch
and talk to me. Hummingbird words. In a humming
way. When they are feeling playful, they blaze invisibly
across the yard and hide under the date palm fronds,
nudging a few insects I can't identify.
I think of songs that have to do with gardens:
Carol King's 'Tapestry', ‘Inch by inch, row
by row’... I think of that film where Peter
Sellers is the gardener: Being There. I grin at
the violets and at how I can just 'be there' in
this garden. I think how my very favorite painting
hangs above the Getty's gardens, and how I miss
the many gardens I have planted.
My son's strawberry patch back home in Seattle,
and how he called them wumbubbas when he was two
years old. There are no strawberries, though, in
Sue's garden. And I haven't seen my son in four
and a half years. Surely he must now be taller than
the rhodies and azaleas up there. Surely he still
likes berries.
I turn to other forms of light. The moon carving
shadows on the 1920's siding. A crow's eye daring
me to put down my book and follow. The shimmer on
vinca leaves at dawn. I aim my camera at veins in
leaves. I watch a beetle scamper over narcissus.
Squirrels leave a trail as the two of them rattle
bushes and leap across continents. They bicker like
an old married couple, but find contentment in a
palmful of raw cashews I set out in front of the
mostly hidden Ganesha another artist situated when
her life was healing, too.
I pick mint or thyme and put them in soup or on
chicken and wonder how my old valeriana plant fared.
And has the white hemlock really grown to twenty
feet? I don't wonder much about why the trees seem
smaller here, or why things that go dormant ten
degrees north still climb walls here in LA winters.
The morning glories just snicker proudly.
For Christmas, I hung lights around the French
doors and an ornament on my lucky money tree. The
one Kathleen gave me a year ago, noting how mine
was extra lucky because there were so many six-leaved
branches. I tacked angels on the walls and tried
to name the stars.
We had a party, and everyone found the garden at
Christmas enchanting. Candles in green jars, candles
in hanging frames, candles floating in the pool.
And tiny lights all round, dancing to carols about
Wenceslas and mangers. Myrrh burned halos around
my little room, cedar absent in the boughs. My daughter
said how it was so much like me, the garden in winter.
I wasn't really sure what she meant. But we laughed
and listened to the
garden birthing Christ.
The morning after the party, I awoke and had tea.
When I walked down the brick path at noon on Christmas
day, careful not to catch my ankle in the funny
lump by the gargoyle, I looked back and saw a choir
of angels: a blue jay, a hummingbird, an ant wedding,
and a cactus blossom like glass blown by the breath
of Danu.
And the morning after Christmas, I awoke and had
tea again. Watching the garden breathe, I celebrated
and sipped. Slowly. Thought how the candle I'd lit
at Saint Sophia's must have burned out by now.
When I first moved in, I didn't take to heart Sue’s
warnings about the roof leaks and flooding floors.
But after New Year's, in fifty knots of wind and
with rain an Olympic competitor, I climbed the roof
to lay down a tarp I'd found, spacing bricks to
hold it against the storm. The garden looked smaller
from the roof. But much, much greener in the wet.
Seattle green, and wet.
The mornings have been colder lately. Yesterday,
the smallest hummingbird ever came. I sipped my
tea and listened intently as it discovered the succulent
with blooms like alien heads. It's under-wings were
strawberry red.
I thought about my son.
Then stopped, and sipped.
Thought about my son.
Life in the garden goes on, yes.
Even when attention isn't paying.
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