The Backyard

It was my backyard, not just because I bought it, but because I built it. When we moved here, it was nothing but fill dirt and a hole at the base a cliff. I carried railroad ties on my back. I built retaining walls. I brought in dirt with a wheel barrow and built terraces. I shoveled gravel and made pathways. I built beds for gardening, dug holes, and planted trees. Then he decided it was his, and he could plant what he wanted, where he wanted. how he wanted and so did she.

One evening,in a rage, after we had an argument. after he drove away in his pick-up truck, I took a pick axe and went down to the garden, and with a single swing severed the thin trunk of the apple tree he planted beside the pathway. I turned to the garden bed and began hacking and chopping. I cut down the tall green stalks of corn growing from seeds he had sent for from Chiapas. I tore the wheat and barley from the beds where I wanted tomatoes and cucumbers to grow. Then, I took the axe and, one by one, I chopped out the berry bushes planted on the steps of the gravel walkway beside the fence. It was growing dark. I was growing tired. I looked at the chickens clucking frantically in the coop and then at the pick axe in my clenched fist. That would end it. That would be a death blow to his challenge.

Yesterday I watered the garden bed where I had planted three rose of sweet white corn. They were hybrids. I couldn't find any heirlooms in the local stores and thought it was too late to order on-line so I planted the hybrids in the beds wear Morgan's Chiapas corn had grown the summer before. The chickens pecked and clucked in the coup. Morgan was at school in Washington.

Over the winter I composted the weeds pulled from the garden and the slope. After I planted, I spread it on top of the bed. It looked rich and black especially when wet. The weeds and the random plants growing wherever the the seeds landed last autumn where gone, replaced by plants planted in rows on a grid. Still, a gourd and a tomatio grew in the bed of corn and potatoes everywhre. I let them grow out of respect for Morgan. I did the same with the far bed where the wheat and barley, the beets and onions and onions grew. It was bittersweet. I was getting something back, but I was taking it from Morgan.