Coming Home
A blue car screeches around the corner. Miss Jackie says, I’m out of here.” I tell her to go before the shooting starts and then turn back to the school garden. I fire up the weed whacker and take down the grass when I hear Adrian yelling my name from the corner.
I walk over.
“You smell something?” he says. “Something’s on fire.”
I do smell something. The same blue car comes a moseying down Miro Street and stops right near Adrian. He’s asking them do they smell something burning and I’m thinking they started the fire and I’m hoping they’re not holding heat they might use on Adrian. This is just the way my mind thinks.
They pull away. Adrian goes back to doing what he was doing and so do I. Before the blue car came Jackie told me that everybody left the school. That all the staff I used to know are gone.
“Something’s going on,” she said. “I just don’t know what.”
And I don’t know what either. Working in that garden, knowing that I planted or nurtured everything that grows along the edges, knowing that there is not much to eat but long beans, molokhia, an unripe green papaya and the beginnings of okra. Knowing too, that it looks as if the citrus will survive. It would seem that all that I lay, the wood chips and leaves and the cuttings of moringa and pigeon pea have served to feed the space where these grow.
There are six or seven entrances to Mystery Garden. Have I told you that it came down to Mystery and Queen Garden and the final vote was for Mystery by a nose. I preferred Queen, though now I could think of it as nothing but what it is, and so I think about how to incorporate Mystery, how to make tunnels of tithonia at the entrance. And I think that I will keep planting even if people keep taking the trees.
This does not mean that my heart always rules my ideas. Today I clipped Ceylon gooseberry to create a space for the back entrance on Alvar Street where one side door is the aforementioned gooseberry and the other tithonia rising high and just now serving as a trellis for the purple flowers and purple beans of lab lab.
The thorns of this gooseberry are nothing to play with. I wondered as I clipped whether burying these clippings partially might result in some new growth and thereby in some new plants. I did not want me or the children to forget where I put the trimmings and poke our hands, but there was an evil part in me that wanted this to happen to whoever took the trees. So I put the cuttings around a pepper plant and between zinnias which could have been a trap.
The ultimate goal for any space is to be able to grow what feeds the soil, to be able to have coppice trees. Coppice means a tree that is grown specifically to be cut and to feed other trees, and yet sometimes I have difficulty cutting anything. This is the watcher in me, the one who wants to see what will happen without my interference. This is not a bad thing.
I do wonder why all the staff has gone. I wonder why the principal has never once introduced herself. I wonder what more I could do. I wonder about familiarity, the way two former students walk down the street and remember me, the way that maybe kids are better off having a consistent presence rather than a continuous search for a better teacher.
I revel sometimes in glory or those early days, when the kids worked with me in the garden, and I am happy that I captured some of these moments. And I am happy to let you know that you can see them, too, by going onto akiligarden on Instagram. And I was really happy to learn that because I created that domain, I never have to give it up.
