My Garden and Me
How anything and everything reflects your inner state
I fired the gardener. Again.
Every year, it is the same. The garden goes absolutely crazy, covered in weeds up to my hip, ropy jasmine and grape vines clambering over nearby trees and shrubs. The creeping thyme between the flagstones gets overtaken and choked out. The roses droop, weighed down by spent, grey-petaled blooms. The orange and lemon trees grow peaked, their leaves thin and mottled.
The fig, however, is all ablaze with life in any season. Now, for example, though its sleek grey branches are devoid of leaves, the tips of each of those branches bulges like a woman in her ninth month, holding in its little fist an explosion of tender green leaves shaped like questing hands. Hands that unfurl and reach for the sun. In late summer, the tree produces hundreds of dappled, puce Brown Turkey figs with sweet, rosy interiors.
I had to do it. Fire the gardener, that is. He comes with his crew, trundles up to the curb in a heavy, rocking white truck. I watch them through the window. The crew piles out, tromps over to the back of the truck and pulls from the bed the weird gasoline-powered blower that creates the most insane racket. I can see the gasoline sloshing around in the translucent plastic tank. That’s why I have to fire them, each time, these…
