…to be the one* whose garden missed her. I’ve been away on a fourteen day, five thousand mile roadtrip. I thought the garden would be okay, it being monsoon season and all.
The garden was not okay. Everywhere I look I find abject scenes of heat and drought devastation. Eggplants are shriveled and strangely soggy to touch, must obviously become compost. The Birds Eye pepper is hanging in, but only just. Jalapeño and Serrano pepper plants are shriveled and barely alive.
Birds have had their merry way with the ripening figs, leaving only shreds hanging.
Fortunately the fig tree is laden with fruit. I eat four or five slightly underripe, bird sampled figs right there under the tree, the car doors ajar and not yet fully unpacked, just to assert my right to a share of this fruit, from this tree, rooted in this earth.
One of the tomatoes, the Rutgers, is living up to it’s heat tolerant reputation and, while also looking wilted and stressed, is laden with lovely ripening fruit.
There’s unpacking, a mountain of laundry, photos to edit, journey storytelling to do, the threads of this desert life to pick up again.
But first the garden. It has the most urgent and desperate needs.
*thanks to Scottish group The Proclaimers for providing an earworm for this 5000 mile journey, and the liberty I have taken above with the chorus line from their 1988 song “I’m gonna be (500 miles)” . “But I would walk five hundred miles/And I would walk five hundred more/Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles/To fall down at your door”.
Then there’s this too from the same brothers: “I wonder my blood, will you ever return…”
Letter from America
When you go will you send back
A letter from America?
Take a look up the railtrack
From Miami to Canada
Broke off from my work the other day
I spent the evening thinking about
All the blood that flowed away
Across the ocean to the second chance
I wonder how it got on when it reached the promised land?
I've looked at the ocean
Tried hard to imagine
The way you felt the day you sailed
From Wester Ross to Nova Scotia
We should have held you
We should have told you
But you know our sense of timing
We always wait too long
lochaber no more
Sutherland no inure
Lewis no more
Skye no more...... etc
I wonder my blood
Will you ever return
To help us kick the life back
To a dying mutual friend
Do we not love her?
Do we not say we love her?
Do we have to roam the world
To prove how much it hurts?
Bathgate no more
Linwood no more
Methil no more
Irvine no more
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