Letting Go of the Garden

“Hey!” a high-pitched voice called down to me.

I stopped raking and looked up: the owner of the voice was a boy, maybe five or six, who was sitting on the fire escape of the apartment two floors above mine. He was sucking on a bright blue Popsicle, his brown legs dangling through the railings.

“Hey,” I said back. Setting the rake aside, I shaded my eyes to see him better.

“Watcha doin’?” the boy asked, kicking one sneaker back and forth. His lips were the color of Windex.

“Raking the dirt,” I replied, somewhat halfheartedly.

The boy regarded me for a moment. Then he said, “Why?”

It was a good question. For almost a week, I’d spent my afternoons fruitlessly attacking the dense-packed mud in the “yard” of my first-floor Brooklyn flat. It was April, and I had moved to the apartment from farm country just a month earlier. Nostalgic for the lawn and garden I’d left behind—I had visions of turning the dingy, twelve-foot square outside my new back door into a blooming oasis of azalea bushes and perennial beds. What I especially wanted, though, was grass—a patch of sweet-smelling green that I could walk in barefoot, like I had back home.

So far, though, the little piece of ground had stubbornly resisted my efforts. The dirt, which had probably sat untouched for the last half-century, was hard and unyielding as asphalt. Determined, I’d lugged gardening tools and an economy-sized bag of peat moss on the subway from a nursery on Atlantic Avenue, but I was under no illusions; it would take weeks of hacking, sifting, and aerating for anything to be able to grow there.

Of course, this was all much too complicated to explain to the kid on the fire escape, who was still watching me. So, taking up my rake again, I said, “Well, I want to grow stuff down here.”

The boy looked at me silently, running a turquoise tongue over his lips. Then he got up from his perch.

“You crazy,” he said, and then disappeared through the window to his apartment. Later, beneath where he’d been sitting, the tines of my rake snagged in a half-buried nest of splintered Popsicle sticks.

There were many such artifacts waiting for me in the mud, as it turned out. Over the next few days, as I dug deeper, my little yard became a sort of urban archeological site.