How Does Her Garden Grow?

 "Summer Garden at Dusk" by Amy Scholten.  Amy's original paintings can be purchased at Inner Medicine Art Gallery

Amy, wary, so contrary, how does her garden grow? With seeds planted too late to bear fruit. With compost that ends up feeding the bugs and not the plants. With store bought tomato plants that cost more than the money she saves from gardening. With many busy hours spent accomplishing nothing while dreaming of an ideal future that already happened yesterday, or is happening here and now, only she’s too focused on tomorrow to experience it.

Her garden grows from endless rain, weeds that crush the coveted peas, deer flies that swarm around her head, and barking dogs that want to be fed green and wax beans that haven’t even sprouted yet. It grows from the rocky goddamned soil that she should’ve tested before buying the plastic spider-breeding ranch house that sits on it, which she didn’t want in the first place but bought because of the nice big flat green yard that would provide a perfect garden. It grows from cow shit that she buys, dog shit that she throws out, and all the shit that she doesn’t buy or throw out.

Her garden grows from an almost 50 year old back that’s aching from all the muscle it takes to plow, plant, weed  and water every inch of this bug biting, slug crawling, wormy little dirt farm of diminutive predators that try to eat it. And she wonders if maybe she’s just a little bit crazy!

Her garden grows from grace, because there’s always a drought when she’s on vacation and her half-assed friend barely waters it and what can she do, fire him? It grows because she comes home a week later and waters the living crap back into it and revives it, wondering why her friend said he’d do it when he didn’t.

Her garden grows because of the lure of magical butterflies and splendid September days when there’s a quiet, reassuring hum of crickets that harken love and abundance, as they did years ago when she burst forth from her hopeful mother’s labor, like the sweet, ripened tomatoes that now fall at her feet.