A Unique Garden Indeed

There is this very old Creole woman in Benque who carefully tends her garden every day with a diligence and compassion to be replicated. I pass this garden on days when walking to the bus and it seems different every time. Completely different. Sometimes I catch sight of her working, hunched over, picking up rocks, trash and the plants that have died, tidying her little patch of land. One day I caught her transplanting cuttings of flower and bush stocks taken from healthy plants nearby. I noticed she encircled the new additions with piles of dusty dirt and rocks to keep them stable in their new environment. This environment however is far from stable. It is right on the side of one of Benque’s main roads, where cars frequently pass, people continually walk and, as I later noticed, her garden is constantly trampled. There are no sidewalks here and her fence is made of stones easily shoved aside. Its so close to the road in fact, that there is no actual soil or earth suitable for planting where she does. Asphalt from road and concrete from building meet right where her garden resides. After over a year, I have finally realized this… the garden looks continually different because nothing actually has a chance to grow. She props up those transplants in an unfriendly territory and then diligently cleans up and tidies once they have died. Over and over and over. The woman is quite old and I wonder how long she’s been doing this. I wonder if she sees the futility of her efforts, or if she cares. She works with such diligence tending her constant rotation of plants in her constantly changing garden plot. And so I wonder, which matters more? The process or the result? Do the healing attributes of working with the earth outweigh the futility of her efforts? Is her garden really any different from others which also face a certain end eventually? I’m not sure where to draw conclusions or what I’m trying to gather from these observations. I like to see this woman enjoying her work though, caring and loving her peculiar little garden, and really – she makes that little corner look beautiful!