The Last Garden
A vignette
It is summer in Johannesburg where my friend has become a gardener during quarantine
Her filmmaking has slowed in a country with real restrictions
She bought some purple flowers she didn’t know required a backyard body of water to sustain
Together we talk a few times a week about the girls we stopped being when we were still pig-tailed and skinned-kneed
I keep alive a plant so enduring that it needs nothing from me and a mason jar bamboo I got for my birthday
But my grandmother decamped outside her 80-year old house in the hottest south Texas summers as she crisscrossed the yard all day declining water or a hat
Cars drove by and honked. Sweaty and limping she waved to strangers she assumed loved the garden she made grow wilder still
When I visited, she toured me to each plant and told me where she had moved it from and where she would transplant it next
Each one had a future and a provenance.
She’s gone now and so is the house. The yard has been razed down to ordinary landscaping, her local eccentricity ripped out by the roots
When she hated being alive, I could make her laugh with intrepid silliness
After I showed her the first real story I wrote, which was about her land, she told me to write. I just remembered that yesterday.
Now that it is Christmastime I forget she died, even though I was with her near the end.
I watched the dying take her over, a piece of her body at a time
I keep feeling that she is somewhere nearby that I can go, between the city and the small town in which she kept a room for me —
In the between-way that I feel her pressed up against this world of the living while bound by the unknown container of whatever else there is
The dimensions separating us blur sideways like vintage static on her drugstore radio that she carried from the dirt to the bedside table and back
My friend says each bud opens for but a moment then closes, but first it sets off a symphony— one by one each adjacent bud opens and then closes too
In one day, each bud lives and then dies
There is only one person I want to tell about the purple flowers, to see if she has seen them,
or if she ever made them grow in the waterless drought conditions
in which she grew everything.
