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My grandmother’s Garden
The thing that I love the most about human beings is that we have passions, we go beyond just our necessities and we discover what makes our lives more fulfilling and enjoyable, they are what make us human. One of the closest people to ever come in my life has been my grandmother and she had a passion that I will probably never forget; She loved to garden and made it one of her daily necessities. She started gardening when she was about 22 because she noticed that the backyard of her house was alone and barren, she decided to change this by just planting a few flowers just to see how it would change the look of the backyard and she noticed that the important thing about gardening is not the result but the journey and the process. She once described gardening as designing with life and I always thought that was a beautiful way to think about what some people believe is a chore. During many years she had settled to garden in a small and confined space in the back of their house because she had small children who would run around the backyard and could possibly damage all of her work and love. After many years in the same house, my grandfather decided that they were going to build a house and that it would have an exclusive garden/yard just so that my grandmother could follow her love and passion without the fear of children and grandchildren, now, destroy it. During the comparatively small amount of years that I have been alive I’ve always sat just on the outside of the garden watching my grandmother plant and move around her garden with delicacy and grace just as a ballerina crossing a stage would, my grandmother was the ballerina and her garden was her stage, and what she made in this garden was beautiful. She changed the way in how I think about people, she taught me that people weren’t just people, we were more, we were what we love and who we love, we were a collection of people at the same time inside of us. Three years ago my grandmother started suffering from cancer and died shortly after. We, as a family, after her passing, that we would take care of her garden and that we would keep it just as cared for and loved as when she left, but just like time we started to slip and about a year ago we just stopped taking care of it completely. I finally noticed that she wouldn’t have cared if we kept taking care of it because what she loved was the journey not the result and because no one from my family inherited this love we didn’t enjoy doing any of the gardening and just did it to have something to look at during our family meals. I didn’t enjoy gardening in that small amount of time that we did it but I understood why she loved it; she saw it as a representation for our family and how she was trying to be the gardener. I now know that she enjoyed her journey; she was the gardener and we were the roses.
