The neighbor's evergreen hedge is clipped so neatly and closely that the rain has veiled it with a silver cloak, as my evening slips into night. I thought for a moment it might be snow icing its top, as stranger things have happened up this way.. this early.. but it is only a trick of light from the streetlight beyond. I'm sure I won't see the bat tonight; that single magical creature who appears from somewhere beyond the golden maple each evening, but I know she's out there somewhere. I take comfort in this.
I am contemplative this evening. My sister and her family were here last week for a visit while on their way to other places and it had been a long time since we had spent time together. She is gone now, and I look out over my garden and remember the hours we spent there.
I particularly remember a conversation we had when my Beloved Husband wandered out and found her hard at work under a weedy stand of bamboo. "You know," he said with a sly grin, "were I to be playing video games from nine a.m. until four in the afternoon, my wife would call me obsessive." She laughed, and he asked quite seriously.."What *is* it about gardening?"
This from the man I affectionately call the "Earth Mover", who patiently digs, hauls, and relocates dirt, rocks and whatever else I point to, not because he loves gardening, but because he loves me.
"This is my sister's garden," she replied, "and it makes her happy. And in a way, it's my garden."
She was right.
It is a patchwork quilt of gardens thrown across miles and years I recall as I stand here tonight watching the rain on my own; a homespun tapestry that has been a backdrop to the chaos of our lives. Enduring much as our love for one another has endured, this love of the garden is a constant for us, and a gathering point where memories are shared and passed along. To this day, the smell of tomato leaves takes me back to my mother's garden, where I was given the truly horrible task of picking those gawd-awful horned tomato worms off the plants. But it was more than a chore, really. Those times she and I spent moving down the rows were times of instruction, of quiet togetherness, and I learned far more about the world than I did about tomato worms.
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