The season after winter. The action. Grow upward, outward, forward.

SUBMISSION BY MÉLISSA GUÉRIN-TORRES \\ 5.2.2020

SUBMISSION BY KANDACE M. \\ 4.23.2020

The world is too much for me to think about, and so I don’t think about it, and I work in my garden. The new house’s yard is overgrown, and, so I spend most of my mornings creating order out of chaos. I weed, pulling out unwanted plants by their roots, cleaning up the space that I can control. We roll rocks to make a path, push cinder blocks into rectangles for vegetable beds, dig up dead trees and chop them for summer bonfires’ firewood. I put on my denim jacket and thick leather gloves and hack back blackberry vines that threaten to strangle everything. At night, the frogs sing in the seasonal creek that flows across our new property, and, once, I see one, hiding under a leaf in the strawberry patch, the bright green a shock of color on the wet earth. We look at each other for a moment. Then, in a flash, he’s gone again, disappeared to wherever frogs go in the daytime. I turn the earth with my shovel again.  

Someone once said that planting a garden is an act of hope. I have decided that I secretly love that I can watch the trees, the plants, the earth, return to life this spring. Part of me feels like I’m coming back to life too. I too am a small green plant pushing through the dark earth towards the sun. 

My next-door neighbors live on a big piece of run-down property, with rusty cars littering the lot, overgrown yellow grass, and a huge industrial warehouse-style building splat in the center. The building’s corrugated metal roof rises high against the sky and seems like it will cut your skin if you get too close. There’s a run-down RV in the “driveway”, beige and foreboding. It’s the kind of the house you avoid, the kind of place that you know brings trouble, the kind of place that you try not to walk next to alone at night. Does anybody live there? I ask myself as I walk Millie past, her little puppy body tugging at the leash to scamper ahead. What is that place? I strain my eyes trying to see through the windows of the RV as I walk by, looking for signs of life. I am surely rude in my staring. Is that a house? A business? I try to spy some flurry of human interaction, some sign that a person is here. Some days, the door of the warehouse stands open, but, then, it is too dark for me to see inside and I don’t want to walk closer. Once, I see a light on. There must be someone there.

One day, I ask my other neighbor, feigning casualness, and she gossips to me that the people there are drug addicts. Her eyes light up; she seems overjoyed to tell me of their misery. It is one of my first conversations with my new neighbor, and she leans on the fence, her elbow grazing her yellow “Trespassers will be shot” sign to whisper it to me. A man and his girlfriend, she says. The way she says it delineates a line between us and them, that her and I are of one type, and they are another. Maybe it will just burn down, she tells me with a laugh, and then someone will build something nice there. Stay away from them, she warns.

I walk Millie every day, and pass the house again, as usual. (I’m calling it a house now, as I believe it must be. Someone lives there, now I know.) I do my usual eyestrain, searching for a glimpse of the mysterious occupants. Nothing new, just the same grimy curtains in the RV, the same piles of random refuse. Millie tugs at the leash. And then: I see it. A wooden planter box, carefully tended, right on the edge of the property. No trash around it. No weeds. And, peeking out of the top: small shoots of green leaves. 

It’s small for sure. Tentative. Just one four-foot planter box in a field of rusty garbage. But someone had taken care here. Planting a garden is an act of hope after all.

Who are these people and their rusty cars, broken RV, and garden box of hope? Who planted this garden? Who tends it so carefully, with watchful eyes and careful fingers, leading the plants to the sun? Or is it a relic of a past time, and somehow, these plants survive anyway. They push through the soil and shit of life to sprout green again anyway, even when they are forgotten or neglected or alone. I feel like Scout, finding a toy in the knot of a tree outside of Boo Radley’s house. Who’s garden is this? Who built it, and why? I imagine the possibilities. Has this garden always been there and I just haven’t noticed? Or is it new, a stubborn step of survival and protest against the darkness? 

I want to rush the door of this place, to tell them, me too, me too, I too am searching for hope in the bottom of a dark barrel of grief. I too am trying to reach for the sun. I too am planting stubborn seeds of hope that grow in rocky, clay-like soil. That afternoon, I break the pieces of clay in my hands, mix the earth with foamy white perlite to allow the soil the breathe. I too, try to breathe. I scatter the small seeds in the new earth, cover them, and walk away. They won’t grow, I tell myself, nothing will happen probably. But a week later, green sprouts, and a few days after that, leaves unfurl. I’m shocked. Are you shocked too, RV-people? Are you shocked at the green shoots of hope that erupt from the earth in the spring? Are you shocked at the brilliant yellow, green, red leaves rioting from the tree branches after the darkness of winter? I am. I’m shocked that the earth can still grow. I’m shocked that the birds will come back to sing. I’m shocked the leaves remember the way to the light and push through anyway. 

SUBMISSION BY ROBIN BISIO \\ 3.19.2020