Memories

The only garden I remember as a child is from the first house we lived in here in Texas. I remember the yard at that house  in many different variations. We lived in El Paso, not too far from Fort Bliss since I walked there from my house once, though it took several hours. I remember thinking it was 10 miles, but who really knows with childhood memories. We lived within sight of Trans-Mountain. I suspect it was a new suburb since the house had no landscaping when we first moved in and the small neighborhood was surround by what seemed a vast desert playground to a small child. I remember a picture of me standing in front of the house in the dusty front yard with my mom's arms around me. I was 4 or 5 yrs old at the time and mostly legs. 

I don't remember if my dad planted the big tree in the front yard or if it was already there. I just remember climbing and falling out of it, and being devastated when I found the house in adulthood and saw that the tree had been cut down. I had a major epiphany about myself that day. I prefer my fantasies to stay fantasies. Somewhere in my head, I imagined other little kids enjoying that tree. Now, I know that it's gone and I wish that I didn't. When "they" say you can't go back, boy, do they sure mean it. 

At the same time around this new house, I find that I want to have some of the crazy garden elements that my mom put together in that large corner yard in El Paso.  I remember being chased by my friends through the arbor which was right next to the house and covered in grape vines. I would reach up as I was running by, grab grapes and stuff them in my mouth. If I stopped in the arbor I could look out and see a Japanese rock garden with a red bridge going to a small green island mound with stone houses in an Asian style. I remember being both ashamed because of how different our yard was and also thrilled by how fun it was to play in. 

I thought my mom was crazy for many years at how she designed our backyard with all its disparate elements. I still think she's crazy, but crazy is no longer a bad word to me and I look back at it all with a hazy nostalgic light. We were the only kids on the block with a pool, a Japanese rock garden, a half basketball court, a arbor with grapes, and way in the back  was my mom's food garden all fenced off to keep running kids playing hide and seek out. 

Hide and seek in our yard was a neighborhood event as the sun went down and the shadows played with all the strange shapes. As I write about it, I wonder if my mom created all of that to distract herself from my dad's death in that very garden, to wipe clean the memory of him laying there dying in the grass between the newly planted trees. The grassy spot where he died was where the Japanese rock garden eventually sprung up. A garden that would take no work once made, a garden that had no living elements in it. No one else would die planting trees or taking care of grass in that section of the yard, now the only life in that part of the garden would be the kids running over it, hiding behind the mound of fake grass or under the red bridge, and posed pictures of girls in pretty holiday dresses sitting on the red bridge surrounded by a lake of white rocks trying so hard to sit straight and still for the camera.