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Our Garden and Yours
your life is vital to mine
If I’m a Bird you’re my hollow bones
If I’m a flower I would hope to God you wouldn’t be my gardener
But still, I’m glad I am planted by you. Here is why:
These other flowers had aromas and grew in vibrant patches of color each unique in their own but together a unit expanding over one another and all together. But us, we were each the same flower in individual pots that were too scared to take root in each other's dirt. All in a row.
Sometimes when the sun and the wind were heavy, my dirt blew over into yours. We both pretended it did’nt.
A lady comes once a month or so to make sure we are still potted plants and gives us what looks like water, and what tastes like water, and when I’m under it, feels like water, but only keeps us satisfied for hours if not minutes. And once she feels she has done her job.. returns quickly back into her house.
But a man comes once a month too. He comes not to water us, but to groom us.
He brings his rakes and his bug sprays and his miracle grow in anticipation that we might expand. But he rakes too hard, and sprays too much, and his miracle grow is toxic and now I’m dying. We each see each other dying. We each see each other unsatisfied and no one tells the man or the lady.
And all the other plants thinks we are cared for because the man and the lady come to see us
but they don’t understand, and neither do the man and the lady
because the man lives in his house
and the lady lives in hers
and we live in between them
at the edge of their yards
The lady’s’ house is warm and bright and always smells of cinnamon and sometimes when it snows she’ll pull us closer to her house so the warmth can blow over us from the window, but she never brings us inside.
Yet the man has no heat and his house is always cold, and the lights are never on but if we asked him for heat surely he would try to knit us jackets or give us his blankets, and once we were cared for would return inside and sit without it...but we never ask.
Once I grew tall enough I could see through the lady and the man’s windows.
Inside the man’s was exactly what I expected, dark, cold but with shelves and shelves of books and papers and charts and sheets, with everything about us, all our needs calculated into numbers and I see him constantly at work on these charts. He spends day and night hunched over at his desk adding and subtracting and adjusting.
Then one time I looked in the lady’s house and it was not what I expected. She had by her window, a plate of cookies, a heater, and a light all for us to see, feel, and smell. And just beyond that was the lady, curled in the corner, by herself, in the dark, shivering and weeping. Always weeping. She weeped day and night and collected all her tears in a bucket. Once a month the bucket would be full and the lady would come outside and water us with it and would then return inside and start again.
The next time the lady came outside to water us, I drank as much as I could and held it inside me and felt for the first time that my thirst was quenched. And when the man came, I prepared myself for the rake, and spray and bent the right way and it didn’t hurt. I hardened my dirt and the miracle grow no longer sunk into my pot, but it rested on the dirt, and I placed my roots upon it. And soon I became so tall that I fell out of my pot and into the ground. I wobbled a bit more than the other plants, and I was a different shade of green but I was planted! I realized then how small my pot was and reveled in how comfortable the ground felt. I could grown as much as I wanted and go anywhere and meet anyone.
Im looking into other people's gardens and I remember how I used to worry. Because when snow falls in their yards all the other plants have their man’s and ladies come sit with them, pulling them together they wrap their arms around them and give warmth from their own bodies. But inside their homes, I see lights, and chairs, and food, and warmth. And I realized that they can come outside and share their own warmth with their gardens because they have more to return to. And I stopped worrying because my man and my lady have none and yet still, I am planted.
