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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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