by Dr. David Fialkoff, Editor / Publisher

I have the key to the garden which is in front of my house. A real estate agent would call the lot "undeveloped." But it is certainly not "empty," filled as it is, packed with plants, hundreds of them, almost all potted, but also with many rooted directly in the earth.

The garden belonged to Catalino, a friendly old man, until he died twelve months ago of a painful undiagnosed abdominal complaint. But a month or two before his demise, just after I moved in, and after my having visited him twice in the garden, with me greatly admiring his urban oasis, so very green in this semi-desert, he gave me a copy of the key to the gate, a chicken-wire and wood affair. Then, I acquired the habit, which I still have, of doing my morning yoga there, barefoot on one of the paths.

When he died, and I tried returning the key to his older son, who lived with him in the red house three doors up from the garden (and still lives there with his extended family), the man, not young himself, stared at me somewhat aghast, "No," he gaped, "You should keep it. He told us about you. He said, 'He is my friend.'"

With Catalino gone I took a more proprietary interest in the garden, mostly cleaning the place up. I freed, from vines that had overgrown them, the metal coils, the skeletal remains of two mattresses, and moved them from their very prominent, very ugly place in the front of the garden, incorporating them, with great utility, in the back fence. I called the recyclers, a mother and her blind adult son down the street, to come haul away two enormous loads of plastic; the first, already present when I arrived; the second, one I made from containers, mostly the bottoms of sawed-off soda and milk bottles, large and small, emptied of dead plants and soil, bottles, or "flower pots," if you prefer, which I removed, well over a hundred of them, from all parts of the garden. Also, I took down at least a dozen meters of orange rubberized conduit (designed to make it safer to work around overhead electrical wires) that Catalino had woven into the branches of the mesquite tree (that shades my yoga plot) because you never know when you might need such a thing. I could go on, but you get the idea. The place was partly a green shrine and partly a dump, somewhat literally.

One day, early on in the process, Catalino's younger son, Felipe, showed up. Seeing him arrive on his motorcycle and let himself into the garden, I went down and introduced myself. A colorful character, if this were a book, I'd present him in interesting detail. But since it is not, I'll just say that he is friendly, although a bit ingratiatingly so.

I liked him, except for his habit of disordering the garden. Each visit he would ride away with an enormous bag filled with flower pots and plants, leaving those that did not make his final selection, along with an assortment of metal chosen for future recycling, strewn across the garden's paths. It didn't take much for me to straightened the place up, but, I admit, I resented the messy intrusion into what was for me a sacred space.

Sometimes he came with his wife (whose father has a farm outside of Comonfort) and their darling one year old son, Joshue. They talked of planting the backside of the garden with corn and beans (which never came to be). When Felipe took the rake that I had used a lot, I hid the shovel. Eventually, his visits became less frequent.

One day, two months ago, out front, as Felipe was about to ride off on his motorcycle, with another full bag strapped to it, I was similarly placed, ready to leave on my bicycle, an empty bag hanging from my handlebars, on my way to the store. After exchanging a few pleasantries there on the cobbles, he invited me to his house. I accepted, rolling down the hill behind him. The hill soon resolving into an extended, gentle, downward slope, we proceeded slowly, the enormous bag strapped on behind him slipping precariously all the way to one side, a short way in the direction of town, before turning off onto a side road and arriving, after a few more turns, at a house painted a pretty aqua-marine.

Inside we came upon his wife standing in the patio (a carport) with, as always, her son, Joshue, in her arms, aside a column, tending a smoke-stained aluminum pot suspended somehow over a very small fire, scraps of wood burning in what might have otherwise been a garden bed. When I asked what she was cooking, she informed me, with a bit of maternal pride, atole for Joshue, which, for those who don't already know, is a warm, thick, slightly sweet beverage made by cooking corn dough or flour with water or milk, and often flavored with cinnamon or vanilla or other savories.

The smoke rising from the fire, the blue-green column blackened with soot, the babe in arms... It wasn't the poverty of the scene that moved me, but its primitiveness. Except for the style of housing and clothes it was completely indigenous, primordial, unchanged for thousands of years.

The patio was lined with an assortment of small plants all in the bottoms of small sawed-off soda bottles, all, my surmise proving correct, being propagated for sale. Considering its cleanliness, I declined the chair Felipe brought forth. But, at his insistence, I accepted the young plant he offered as a gift, placing it in the bag hanging from my handlebars. After some more neighborly chatter, with Felipe practicing the English he picked up in the U.S., and a quick visit to the roof of the house where his main nursery is, I begged forgiveness for the brevity of my visit and rode off to the market.

Familiarity, in this case anyway, breeding acceptance, since then, the flower pots along with their former clumped earthy contents that I find strewn randomly around the garden after one of Felipe's visits do not bother me at all. The garden is his inheritance. I am happy for whatever value they can derive from it. Its abundance, while only a luxury for me, means survival for them.

Just last week, returning in my car with the window down, not long before sunset along the road into San Luis Rey, I saw Felipe and his wife and little Joshue sitting on the grass along the wall of the new real estate development, a bed sheet spread out before them covered with young plants for sale, each little green plant in the bottom of a sawed-off soda bottle. Seeing me at the same time, it was all smiles and waves as I drove past.

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Dr. David Fialkoff presents Lokkal, public internet, building community, strengthening the local economy. If you can, please do contribute content, or your hard-earned cash, to support Lokkal, SMA's Voice. Use the orange, Paypal donate button below. Thank you.

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