It started as a casual affair: one hobby gardener waiving across the street to the other as we watered our hardy perennials out of their winter slumber. Neighbourly nods and smiles ensued, and the occasional compliment or pointing at a certain shrub or flower. The intimacy grew furiously one early evening when she walked over with deliberation. There was no telling her intention when she’d first laid her hose on the ground and started in my direction. She walked right up and grabbed my hand firmly: she was indicating I should come with her, back across the street - and not to her garden at the front, but she was almost pulling me through her side gate and into her back garden. She paused at a large planter and said “you.”
Turns out she’d been propagating, on my behalf, a plant I had admired. Now, she indicated, I was to take it. She directed me as I dug it up. She then shuffled me back across the street and pointed to the particular spot in my garden where I was to dig up the soil and plant it. Her specific instructions continued: how deep to lay the roots, how firmly to pack the soil atop and how much water to add to seal the deal. She nodded that grandmother nod of a job well done, and I smiled.
There was a language barrier, you see. We spoke with eyes and hands and wrinkled expressions that offered the essence of questions and elicited effective enough responses. Each engagement, one of comportment and generosity. Then I didn’t see her for a while - for a long while. Too long, it felt. She should have been out watering, tending. I crossed the street again, of my own volition this time. I knocked and she came - half her size, the marbled face of a person who is distraught. Her husband had passed away; and when I asked if she was ok, she said in a word we both understood, “no.” The only thing watered now were her eyes.
After that time, I visited her; kept making my way over. Once, I toured her house and was introduced to her family through framed pictures: her parents she left back in the Azores as a young girl, her husband with whom she’d immigrated to start a life together, their children and their children. She lives alone now, and I think about what that means. I think about a life propagated, and I think too about what a garden can give a person in its spring and summer, and what it means when the hoses get put away in winter. When we’re no longer required to sustain something, when we retreat to our homes, we can be suspended somewhere between embracing our circumstance and longing for another. And so she comes by now too, and in our way, we sustain, and we tend, this unlikely friendship we’ve propagated.