SOWING SEEDS
SOWING SEEDS
Grandma’s next-door neighbor had planted a row of quick growing poplar trees dense along the boundary between the two properties and then, along the line of trees, a line of gray pickets strung with square wire to ensure that nothing from Grandma’s yard could contaminate their space.
Italians were not popular on Highland Avenue in the 1950s. Out on her back porch the wind brought the neighbor’s comments to Grandma’s ears. “Why didn’t they stay on Larimar Avenue where they belong!”
A friend gave Grandma a bag of hollyhock seeds that Grandma tossed by the handful into the small space between the wired pickets and her own driveway curb, so that flowers would abound next to and be supported partially by the fence. My grandmother had the knack, the green thumb “they” say, that special magic that meant anything she tossed onto or thrust into soil, flourished. By the following spring,
on Grandma’s side the fence line was a mass of flowers on tall stems.
One of the children who lived in that house next door was a girl who looked to be of my own age, about five. While I was playing with imaginary friends in grandma’s spacious, gently sloping, square of green, I often looked across at the girl and her brothers playing tag or hide and go-seek. One afternoon, I decided to investigate the line of hollyhocks more closely. I thought I’d heard a noise coming from the flowers. Indeed I had. Giggles from the girl who was leaning on the fence, evidently hoping the poplars and our hollyhocks would hide her during her latest game with her brothers.
I walked up to the fence, pushed my hand through the flowers and said ,”Hello.” She turned to me, took my hand, squeezed it, and then smiled. We chatted a bit. Suddenly, her brother shouted, “There’s Marguerite!” She ran off. Over that summer, Marguerite, and I began to meet often by the fence and flowers and chat about silly things—first grade coming in the fall, her siblings, our mutual love for dogs.
Grandma came out one afternoon soon after these meetings began, saw me by the fence, laughing talking into the flowers and asked me what I was doing. I told her about the “secret meetings” with Marguerite. “The poplar trees and other bushes over there hide her, so we can talk and laugh, even though her mother doesn’t like us, Grandma.”
Grandma smiled. “I see my hollyhock seeds have indeed flourished! With blooms and friendship.”
Indeed, I often think of Grandma’s response to that neighbor: she’d strewn flower seeds to beautify the ugliness of a neighbor’s fence and with the blooms she had also seen a harvest of hope for a future without the need to fence out neighbors.
Bio:
Joan Leotta is a writer and storyteller.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 