Urban Garden
In a small patch of dirt just three feet wide and five feet long, the intern was planting a garden. She had just graduated college and then moved into the old multi-dwelling for an internship that could end at almost any time if the economy turned south or her bosses lost interest. She had no savings, no ties to the area, and no furniture that hadn’t been dropped off secondhand or pulled from the sidewalk on garbage day, but she was spending her evenings in the dirt of the tiny patch in the sidewalk where a dead tree had been removed and never replaced.
She worked with dollar-store gardening gloves and a garage-sale kitchen knife, digging up the hard soil, and piling up the rocks as she removed them. She pulled out cigarette butts and plastic bits, and she replaced them with gladiolus bulbs, nasturtiums, and marigolds. She sowed in squash seeds and transplanted bean plants she sprouted in a plastic carton.
The neighbors were by turns surprised, pleased, amused, or apathetic, but often amused.
“Squash?” asked the neighbor across the street with a laugh. “You’re really trying to garden in that little patch, aren’t you?”
“Now don’t drive through her garden!” the father admonished his college-student son when he came to visit.
“Thank you,” said the young man walking his girlfriend home.
“You’re making the place more beautiful.”
The gardener was new to the neighborhood, though that was nothing unusual. The neighborhood was both transient and quite old. It had been old already nearly a century ago when immigrants, pushed out of Boston by housing prices, had made it their home. A walking-friendly, intensely urban main street had taken shape, and the Depression-era storefronts, barbershop on the corner, and the butcher shop with the sign, “Live poultry – fresh killed” had remained decades after the builders had been replaced by countless generations of new transients.
Walking-friendly streets became markedly less appealing, and the narrow street behind the faded barbershop was home to a mix of older residents who remembered its better days and twenty-somethings who didn’t care.
But in the two-inch crack between the synthetic, plastic fence and the concrete courtyard, she planted a whole package of green beans, gently sprouted on her bedroom windowsill during an unusually cold spring. She yanked out the weeds and pushed back her neighbors’ rocks and slid the bright green plants into the crack.
They grew quickly, threatening to escape beneath the fence and into the yard next door, so she decided to build a trellis. She found a pile of old wood pilings, set out for the garbage collectors on the next street over. She yanked out the nails and hammered and glued the wood scraps together, then slapped two coats of white paint onto the resulting composite, hoping to head off any complaints from the neighbors.
Out front, the marigolds finally consented to flower, and the squash took over the plot and began to blossom.
“Your farm is ready for government subsidies,” said the neighbor across the street. He gave her an old mail carton so she could haul the water down two flights of stairs from her bathtub more easily. He told her to fertilize.
She considered telling him that she was moving in two months, that the internship hadn’t panned out and she was trying yet another city. But perhaps then he would ask her why she had planted a garden, only to leave it before the squash were fully harvested. He might not understand what that tangled mass of squash and marigold blossoms and the occasional green bean had meant – her gift to the neighborhood that gave her a home.
Instead she thanked him, and she went to buy fertilizer.