More on: gardening

I HAVE A BLACK AND WHITE photograph taken in 1967 that I found among my grandmother’s things after she died. In the foreground, my grandmother sits on a blanket, smiling self-consciously for the camera. To her left my brother stands in a seven-year-old boy’s macho pose with hands on hips, his smooth, hairless chest thrust…

The leaves on the lawn are brown. Beneath them, the wet ground. Beneath them, the silver roots. Beneath them, the darkness. Given the chance to change, you hold on, the fist a clenched bulb. Last year’s tulips come up again, smaller, shorter, failing— the stunted stem a symptom. The rain tastes like copper, an old…

We planted the seeds in the spring And up they came innocuous as crabgrass. The tomatoes soon lorded over them, And even the jalapenos, sad lumps Hanging from their limbs like mittens From children playing in the snow. They stayed that way all summer, And before the frosts of November We pulled them up, declaring…