Bud

Sometimes I get to live for surprises, like the way a purple flower budded out on the dragonfruit stretching from the foo dog’s head on my front steps. 

I spent this morning at a place called Gumbo Garden, a part of Xavier University wit a guy named Glenn and a woman called Sarah. We pulled bindweed or grass or whatever it was that the Army Corps of Engineers introduced to hold the levees intact. In between these twenty-foot rows, framed by cinder blocks, more of these bindweed grew and more will come through and the roots go down so deep we cannot possibly get all of this.

I have struggled with the same grass in different spots. I have built boxes. I have tried to control. I have fought. I have pulled. And then i stacked, higher and higher, composting in place, growing my compost in place, what some call cover crops.

Nature abhors bare space. Nature knows no straight line. We may get to this, but for now I want to stay at Xavier where Glenn said they pulled a rusty car from this lot between the highway and the house of a woman just turned a hundred and one and loves to pick greens for her Christmas and Thanksgiving meals and for any meals in between for that matter.

He told me how she now no longer comes into the garden but still watches from her porch. I told him about Mr. Lee, how when I first started growing on the lot near my house and behind his how he would stand with his arms folded, his whole eighty year old frame stuffed into a pair of denim overalls, and ever present unlit stub of a cigar between his teeth.

And then he asked could I get him some Tabasco peppers. And then he brought me mirliton. He asked could I get him some bay leaves. And from there we never passed each other without speaking. Old Mr. Lee lived all alone with “shoes older than me”, in a two story white house protected by a ten foot high fence and razor wire. He was the one told me put a fence around the garden on Needle Street. And he was the one who came by one day with one of those jars they sell Starbucks coffee in at the gas station. He had poked a hole in the cap, stuffed the glass with vinegar and Tabasco peppers.

You know the way they measure things is often through quantitative data. This, the Tabasco peppers and shoe telling stories and the way we changed through each other in the six years before his death cannot be measured. Not quantitatively.

I had opinions and ideas to offer at the Gumbo Garden, but I was not there for that. I did have to offer one thing, that rather than pull the only thing growing other than bindweed, that we instead cut off the eggplants and spread rotted wood chips around them so they could flower and produce more fruit in October.

This is where much of what i have begun becomes confusing in that for so long i shared my body, my heart, my mind and my time for free without doing what i loved.

I got to stand with Christian after Xavier and examine possibility. Behind the four plex we found the hottest spots. Rather I showed him based on the cardinal directions. We discussed possibility. We spoke of walking into the back, of gathering outside. He marked off a square. I told him how nature knows no straight lines.

He grew quiet. “I’m trying to think,” he said. “I think you’re right.”

We spoke of changing a mind that is conditioned. I acquiesced to his square provided my input around plants and spacing would be considered. 

He said he might have Angie come and rip out the entire front. I told him we could put guava and pitanga there. Even some papaya. That we could start with moringa and pigeon pea. He asked could they be evenly spaced.

I said, “Eventually.”

I am learning to work with those who do not always see the world exactly as I do. I am working to learn that nobody sees the world the exact same. I am working to know that we all have this inherent desire to connect before we die and that this desire comes out in a myriad of ways, and part of the excitement of life is the realization that i am capable of seeing this in everybody I meet.