Letting Go of the Garden

I unearthed beer bottles and candy wrappers and spent batteries, soggy matchbooks and broken plastic forks, half a purple china mug, a matted Dr. Scholls insole, and a one-armed Han Solo action figure. There were rusty wire hangers, peach pits, kitchen magnets in the shape of alphabet letters, hair barrettes and cigarette butts, empty Chapstick tubes and about a hundred of those metal pull-tabs that used to come off soda cans. One day I found a wet, filthy dollar bill; on another I discovered a decapitated Barbie like a tiny homicide victim. I shoveled all of it into garbage bags and dragged it to the bins out front, where my building mates were always sitting on the stoop, smoking and talking after work.

Slowly, I made progress. There was one major setback after a heavy rain, which turned my carefully fluffed soil back into a slimy, Fudgesicle-like slab, but once I carved little drainage trenches around the edges of the yard, things began to dry out again. I mixed in a second bag of peat moss. I bought fertilizer and a garden hose. Finally, feeling victorious, I scattered thick handfuls of grass seed over everything. 

That night, I called a friend back in rural Massachusetts, where I’d moved from.

“Guess what?”  I said. “I’m going to be the first person on my block to have my own yard!”

I knew that it would take four or five days for the grass seed to send up sprouts, but I could hardly wait. I went to bed on the third night—the first warm night of the season—imagining that I’d wake to see tiny green threads poking through the dirt, evidence of my success. 

When my alarm clock rang in the morning, I leapt out of bed and made for the glass-paned back door (which would let me gaze through the safety bars at a mass of color once my garden was in bloom). But as I approached, something seemed weird. The view of my yard seemed to be obscured by something, some sort of billowing white cloud. Fog? I rubbed my sleep-blurred eyes.

The mystery was solved as soon as I opened the door. In all the time I’d worked on my yard, I’d never given a thought to the crisscrossed network of laundry lines that hovered just a few feet over my head, suspended between the fire escapes above. Now, though, it was clear that my neighbors had been awaiting the warm weather for their own reason: a chance to save money on the dryers at the laundromat.