Blueprint

I started a class because I believe that by healing the soil people will heal themselves and the world. I was disappointed when only one person signed up. Last night I realized that was perfect. I often realize that everything is perfect, and the juice that comes from this is sweeter than any fruit.

In the parking lot of Office Depot, we popped open gulf coast penstemon seed pods, poked our fingertips, leaning over the back of my truck.

Evan said, “It’s like eating shrimp.”

I showed him something on the top of my hand. “I don’t know if that’s a burn or an irritation or some kind of plant or a scratch or what. You get in touch with the earth, you’ll find things all over your body.”

We got a giant pad of graph paper, but not before helping a woman we’ve watched struggle over the years, a woman now with a boyfriend and a baby, trying to get printer ink. Evan gave her his phone. 

I knew my exact place in the world, standing under the bamboo with Evan, in an alleyway behind the hotel restaurant. We had fifty-four feet to work with, most of which was shaded. 

“We can use some of what is already here,” I said. 

I explained how the bamboo did not need the leaves that had fallen, how these could be moved up front where there was more sunlight near the trellis where we will see whether long bean, butterfly pea, luffa, and malabar spinach like to climb. 

He rolled up the blueprint plans we had made. I say blueprint loosely and plans even looser, for who knows what might happen in that space where we found a rusty box and I said, “You drill a couple holes in the bottom, add soil and calendula seeds and some rich person from Uptown might give you fifty bucks.”

I told him that I believed creating something out of nothing was not a pipe dream. I believe creating something out of nothing is the inalienable right of any creator, and I believe that we are all creators and the appreciation that comes with art is the appreciation that comes with the divine that exists inside each one of us.

I could see it, the possibility that existed in the already built planter box between the pool and the bar, where borage might be snipped and put into drinks, where what people call buzz buttons could be grown and added to cocktails for those who wanted a numb mouth, just for moments. 

What I have always wanted to give to a person is access inside himself, to that place that never lost connection with the earth. We discussed what might climb, how we might take existing four by four posts and build an arch through which the employees of this hotel restaurant might pass. I knew the freedom that would come to Evan. 

I saw the future. I saw the seeds pop up and the way he walked out day by day to see how what he did, together with the rain and sun, had changed a small place. 

I left him at the entrance to his condo with an old tackle box of soil and some seeds we took from cosmos and marigolds on the way out the gate. 

He told me, “I get what you’re talking about. With variety. With an ecosystem. Ever since they planted all these plants I haven’t had as much trouble with bugs.”

I drove home excited, for the possibility, excited for him.

I thought of the dozens of hotels like his and how papaya and guava and other tropical fruits might intermingle with what already grew. I thought how I will start thousands of guava, for their beauty and their color and their shape. To watch the entire species develop and change, to learn better ways of describing them.

I dream big. But I can see. An entire city of CRISP guavas. One thousand plants started in the greenhouse, stored in the 9th Ward for the winter. 

I started with a tomato plant in a cold storeroom in Prague. Homeless. Sleeping next to a water pipe on a concrete floor, each night knowing the possibility of waking with a blistered thigh. Moving closer anyway. 

Evan will start with a trellis between two walls with some Eastern sun, and who knows what might become of this.

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