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A Secret from my Garden
By sharmagne Leland-St John

Sharmagne notes:
"This is a piece which came about as the result of a chance encounter with a former high school friend and sweetheart...whom I happened to run into the other day. I was surprised at his reaction. After all these years he is still bitter."


I had an interesting thought while I was out digging up decomposed granite from the new garden area so that I could fill it in with a foot or so of amends, potting soil, and rich dark composted topsoil. Sitting nearby were flats and containers of Pansies, Johnny Jump-Ups, Columbines, Garden Mums, Blue Star Creeper, and the Amaryllis bulbs known as Naked Ladies for their beautiful and dainty pink bell shaped flower.

As I dug out shovels full of the crumbling sand-like granite I discovered that after the Northridge earthquake of 1994 my contractors had broken up and buried my old foundation and huge slabs of the concrete from my old patio under the terraced gardens in a lazy effort to "clean up" without hauling it away.

This reminded me of when I was creating Bob's garden for him in the early days of our courtship. At the time I was amazed to find that he had done some work on the roof of the log home he had built years earlier and had buried pieces of his old roof and other construction debris beneath the soil in his back yard exactly where

he had designated the new flower beds to be planted. It was hard to get anything to grow there because the ground had been poisoned. The failure rate was more than the success rate. At the time I thought that perhaps The Great Spirit had sent me to teach the Wasichun not to destroy the earth with his garbage. Eventually I got a garden going in that plot at great expense and months and months of hard, back breaking toil.


Today while I was digging in my own garden, in my own back yard a thought struck me. If you bury garbage in your garden, flowers won't grow. If you bury garbage in your heart, you won't grow.

 

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