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Corner Garden
- Fordham University Press
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Corner Garden Dara Ross The D train rumbles underground as heat rising in waves from subway grates makes corner-store flowers wilt. But here, before the bulldozers , in the name of affordable housing, came into the garden that we made of this vacant lot, summer sun made budding flowers bloom. I miss our garden as I walk down the block. I pass Julio, Felix, and Manny sitting on milk crates in front of the bodega, talking their usual talk. ‘‘Boy, this heat sure is a bitch.’’ ‘‘Shit! This ain’t no heat! Last week when I was down in San Antonio visiting Magdalena in school it was at least 110 degrees in the shade. I was out there just cryin’ sweat. It was so hot that even them rattlesnakes out there was sweatin’! Shoot, I’d take this ol’ city heat over some ol’ desert dry heat any day, Jack.’’ The three were retired civil service workers living on pensions and Social Security checks. Julio used to drive a bus, Felix was a hospital janitor, and Manny was a postal worker. Due to limited economic means, but also maybe due to their city roots, they did not follow the migration of senior citizens to Florida. Instead, they spent nearly every day sitting in front of the bodega. When I came out of the subway, on my way home from work, I passed them sitting on these crates like magpies on a perch. They were always engrossed in conversation. Unlike Loudtalking Zora, the three observed the goings-on in the neighborhood but rarely made comments on them. Usually if they were not talking about the PAGE 37 37 ................. 18313$ $CH5 09-07-12 13:54:31 PS 38 Dara Ross weather, or if Julio was not dominating the conversation with tales of his extensive travels, they talked about either the Knicks or the Yankees. I overhear them talking about the same things I overheard them talking about in the garden. They talked about going to the Yankees’ opener as Felix planted neat rows of radish seeds in freshly turned soil. They talked about how hot it was while Manny carefully transplanted indigo petunia seedlings that he had been nurturing for weeks into carefully hoed soil. They talked about how the Knicks were ‘‘going to go all the way!’’ this year while Julio planted hyacinth bulbs. Now they sit and talk their talk in front of the bodega. On hot summer nights like this, everyone has taken to sitting. We sit on our front stoops watching traffic go by, yearning for the open spaces and the cool quiet places of our garden. Things are not the same around here. Mornings are no longer getting up early to pick mint leaves for tea before grinding off to work. Evenings are no longer for watering Universal pansies and impatiens with your grandmother’s rusted tin watering can. Weekends are no longer for making preserves out of apples and rosemary sprigs from the garden. In late May, the cackling songs of migratory birds no longer drown out the sounds of boom boxes and police sirens. Everyone who lives in these apartments above valued the open space of the garden. We loved the idea of having our own land, where we planted what we wanted and reaped what we sowed in order to woo a lover or to remember a lover past, to make scented bath oils and soap, or to moonshine strawberry wine. Even before there was a community garden, lots of folks filled their fire escapes with window boxes that spilled marigolds, poppies, petunias, pansies, and impatiens over the iron railings. There was hardly a windowsill or a fire escape without some flowers growing on it. Every corner where there could be a planter filled with tall tulips or a hanging basket of ferns, there was one. The people in this neighborhood love to grow things. But only after the garden was begun were so many people able to fulfill their dreams of farming fresh vegetables or raising patches of their favorite flowers. Once we realized that our garden had become endangered and that we might lose its comforts, once we found out that the city was looking to demolish our little plot of nature, we fought as hard as we could. Eventually we failed as political activists to claim what we had worked so hard to grow as community activists. They said the garden had to go. That the land belonged to the...