Tom Homewood The Gardener |
2000
The Old Gardener
This
is Danusha Goska
There
are prize winning rock stars and scholars among us in Bloomington, but in our
day-to-day lives, celebrities may have little impact. As a working class grad
student, I take inspiration from unsung heroes. I walk to campus along a
railroad, a harsh terrain exposed to bitter wind in winter, and searing summer
sun.
One
day I saw a man, in suspenders and a straw hat, tending a garden in this almost
Martian landscape, even as an eighty-car coal train thundered past. "What
a beautiful garden you have!" I shouted. "What a beautiful body you
have!" he replied. A harmless witticism, but from a grandfatherly Hoosier,
it rendered me timid. I never spoke to him again. But, year after year, as I trudged
to campus, convinced that my department would stop only at hiring a hitman to
get rid of me, I drew inspiration from his garden.
In
spite of poor and peaked soil only a tad more frangible than concrete, no water
source, and foraging rabbits and deer, his onion greens speared through every
first thaw; spring sprang enchanting floral displays; plump ruby tomatoes
punctuated summer; harvest chaff battened his well-tended compost pile.
Until
this spring. No one has harvested this year's onions, growing neatly, all in
their rows. No hands have tamed bolting cauliflower, or yanked invading waves
of weeds and tares threatening to swallow garden design. The old man, my
inspiration, has apparently moved on to greener pastures, and I am stunned by
the sadness I feel at his absence, a sadness that alerts me to how profoundly
one lone, anonymous gardener's flint and creativity have illuminated my path.
For
Speak Your Mind, this has been Danusha Goska.
This is an essay I broadcast via WFIU in 2000. I repost it because I'll be referring to it in an upcoming essay I will also post on this page.
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