What Is
A blank canvas with infinite possibility
Long beans climb the papaya tree outside my bedroom window. Every season I learn a little more about how to combine aesthetics and utility. A fine balance exists. The same way an interior designer might combine modern and rustic so as not to be overwhelmed by either.
I sometimes take on too much and then complain that I don’t have enough time to get done what I set out to do. One of the good things about starting a business is that I go in up front with an estimate of what I will and won’t do and what this leads to. Having a vision allows me to stick within the parameters while imagining for the future.
At Edgar’s house I have agreed to put down cardboard and wood chips along with beans and pigeon peas and sunflower and cuttings that will be used to build the soil. I already have plans of adding fully grown plants that I have invested time in. Time is money as they say and so is knowledge and so as I’m hauling and dropping the wood chips yesterday a man comes by, says his name is D, says he’s there to detail his sister's truck. Parked that baby almost in the middle of the street, he did.
“I did kind of what you’re doing,” he said. “Only I cut the grass real short.”
I had cut the grass almost a week before and this would not be the only time that I dropped rotted wood chips. I was making something out of nothing. I also know that when elders speak and want to give unsolicited advice rather than try to explain my own reasoning behind why I'm doing what I'm doing I've found it better to listen for a polite amount of time and at some point, when it seems appropriate, to return back to working.
Dee didn’t give me much space between his words. Said he was a retired truck driver. Said he likes to detail cars. Got a garden himself over where he stays.
I did get back to work after about ten minutes. He took his towel and examined that baby while circling the truck, examining again like he was expecting to see the shroud of Turin.
On the edges of what I’m building there will need to be stone or logs to keep the grass from coming out of the edges, to keep building up and up.
This morning I let out the animals and saw that the first strawberry calendula popped up. I thought that I might start another tray of calendula. I thought about how I might start more greens, how as the earth becomes more alive I will be able to plug in what I know grows.
You can sometimes see a story in what is left, the lives of the people who lived in that old house before Edgar, not the first people in 1865, but the last people who put cactuses in hand painted boxes along the windows of the shed. Maybe these people came from out West. Arizona perhaps.
A kid’s fishing pole tangled up in the orange tree. New parents, younger perhaps based on the spare tire for a jeep all tangled up beneath cayratia Japonica. They kept the bottles, likely found while digging, back on the cinderblock foundation of the shed, a hint of nostalgia for a place they had never been.
I wonder what happened to these people. They weren’t there long. I watched that house being restored. I even went inside with the permission of the workers less than five years ago.
Edgar’s wife Julie told me the plants that she wants, some of which I have experience with and some of which I don't. I spoke to a janitor from the school who asked me whether I had a card, and asked me if I knew about the West Bank. I said I did.
I told him what I have come to believe, not that what I am doing is about more than money. I didn’t tell him that what I am doing is about life.
I told him, “I want the kids to be able to look through the fence and see flowers and butterflies. I want this space here to draw in the eye.”
Others walked by while I worked. White women with dogs mostly. All of them curious, but not quick to return my hello.
I have ideas. I have papayas to deliver. And perhaps this afternoon I will have the opportunity to draw out a map and see whether or not Edgar and Julie will be interested in some of what I think might work best.
