Johnny's Garden9/19/2019 In attempt to make my blog more personal and versatile, I am sharing this personal essay with you. This is an essay I had previously written in my creative non-fiction class. It represents my childhood, the growing age of my grandparents, and the beautiful garden in which I grew up surrounded by. It is dear to my heart, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. When I get the chance, I want to take pictures of the current state of my grandparent's garden and include them in this blog post. The fondest memory that I have of my grandpa, is a bright early morning eating papayas. I peeked into the old kitchen while he sat at the dining table, his hands on the fruit-patterned table cloth. On his portable radio, he listened to a man speaking in Ilocano, saying nothing I could understand. Grandma was cutting open papaya, spooning out the beady seeds, and throwing them into the trash. “Balasang ko, you like eat papaya?” grandpa asked. I shook my head because I was not yet fond of the fishy smell of papayas. “Come, tastes good,” he said. I leaned against the archway and watched as grandma slowly spooned papaya into my grandfather’s mouth. He smiled at the contentment of his food, and grandma smiled too. Grandpa was old, slow-moving, and quiet most of the time, but he somehow always found the energy to walk outside and sit on his old wooden stool. That stool looked as if it were about to fall apart--its loose nails hammered in crookedly, and its wood slowly chipping away over time. I wondered how the stool hadn’t collapsed on him yet. He took the stool with him everywhere so that he could rest as he worked. With his bare hands, he pulled the weeds around his line of cherry tomatoes, harvested rows of dark purple eggplants, and gently plucked bittermelons off of their vines. Grandma lugged the hose around the garden making sure each tree and plant got its fair share of water. “Balasang ko, come help your grandpa water da plants,” she said. Watering the plants was a strenuous and time-consuming job because the whole perimeter surrounding the house had plants of all kinds. When I was left unattended, I’d accidentally get poked standing under the thorns of the Hawaiian orange tree. I’d pluck a handful of leaves from the bay leaf tree and put it to my nose. I’d rip off the beanstalks from the moringa tree, poking out those beady-eyes from their stalks. I started to question if the beans were actually eyeballs. The calamansi tree never seemed to grow to its full potential, and the one or two white carnation flowers only bloomed once a year, during the Hawaii winter, when the air outside gave me chicken-skin. But oh, I could never help but to pick them, even when my aunt put up a sign that said: “DO NOT PICK.” Being in grandpa’s garden was like crossing over a bridge like the Bridge to Terabithia. You’d never know what you’d find under a rock, beneath the underside of a leaf, or in the middle of the grass. Praymantis’s and large flying grasshoppers crept on the stems of plants; ladybugs on the bay leaf trees leaves; toads under rocks, rollie pollies in the dirt; worms, caterpillars, centipedes, you name it. Chickens, dogs, cats, and even rabbits would sometimes find their way into the garden. My aunt spent weeks chasing down a rabbit, trying to make it her own. Perhaps animals were attracted to our garden because they could sense the abundance of life it possessed. But then again, maybe they were just hungry. A month or so after grandpa died, I sat on his old wooden stool in the garden, playing with a white hibiscus flower I had plucked from one of our trees. As I glanced to my left, a large black moth about the size of my hand rested on my shoulder. I didn’t know how long it had been there, but I got up and screamed in fright. It disappeared and I hadn’t even seen it take flight. “It was your grandpa,” grandma said to me after I told her what had happened. Fifteen years later, the garden at my grandparent’s house is no longer the same. There are no cherry tomatoes ready to be attacked by hungry birds, no eggplants to fry on the old rusty stove, and no bittermelons to pluck from itchy vines. The only thing left of the bay leaf tree is an old stump in the ground. Weeds and dry grass have blanketed themselves over the dark rich soil. But the orange tree and many of the flowers still hold their roots in the fertile ground of grandpa’s once bountiful garden. Even the carnation flowers find the strength to continue to bloom once every year. “Grandma, what happened to the garden? Why don’t you grow anything anymore?” I ask. “Because, darling, I am old and your grandpa is not here anymore.”
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AuthorAloha,
I'm Ashley—a current freelance writer and an aspiring travel writer and editor! Archives |