The Garden

Ruth strolled out into her garden munching on a crisp pickle and wearing a big straw sunbonnet as an afternoon rainstorm swept down from the mountains. She straddled a pale green, three-legged stool that stood in the midst of the garden and smiled as big cold drops of rain plummeted from the grey flat underbelly of the clouds.

Her garden had come into its glory in the short hot days and pleasing cool nights of September. Arranged upon a rectangular plot of ground next to a small greenhouse that her husband, Christian, had built with his own hands soon after they had married. The garden, enclosed in a seven foot tall chicken wire fence to keep the deer and rabbits out, brimmed over with the bright red colors of spicy chilies and plump tomatoes, fragrant clusters of green onions and bulbs of garlic, bristling, snaky vines of zucchini and summer squash that threatened to overtake every inch of the garden. At the far side of the garden towering broad-leafed stalks of sweet white corn brushed against one another. Along the inside perimeter of the fence nearest the house sprouted several rows of tiny-leafed Arugula, pale green Bibb, and hundreds of pods of snap peas and snow peas twirled up tall wooden stakes. Near the greenhouse, upon raised mounds of earth, flourished thick-stalked broccoli, winding vines of pickling cucumbers, and clusters of green and red sweet peppers. Scattered throughout the garden bloomed orange, yellow, and white Marigolds, which defended with their musky aroma, like battle-hardened sentries at the watchtowers, the garden from the attacks of ravenous aphids, beetles, and grasshoppers.

A cat appeared from beneath a tomato plant where it had been napping, galloped out the open gate in the chicken wire fence, and as it disappeared through a broken opening in the wooden fence into the neighbor’s backyard Ruth called after it, laughing, “Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Don’t you like the rain?”

Soon the soggy earth yielded its grip on the long tangled roots of the weeds. Ruth rocked the stool side to side with her bottom as she worked her way down the rows, her dirty white sneakers splashing in the water. Just as her determined wet hand closed around another weed, an important artery throbbing with oxygenated blood popped like a kid’s spit bubble deep inside the right side of her cerebrum and surprised her into gasping, “Oh!” The wound-spilled blood seeped into the surrounding brain tissue with every life-giving thump of her heart. Fear mushroomed up inside her. Her desperate lungs gasped for air. More and more blood leaked until weakness, then numbness, and finely paralysis gripped the left side of her body. She tumbled from the stool and crushed some green onions, their pungent essence filling her nose.

Face down in a rain puddle, her nose and mouth submerged and her eyesight blurred, she lifted her head and shouted for help, but her tongue betrayed her with a confusing moan of garbled words. Nausea swept over her and she retched a dark green slurry of pickles. Her head splashed down into the mess. In that instant she knew this was the last experience of her life.

Christian found her crumpled body. He sagged to his knees in the mud, rolled her small empty body up into his trembling arms, and weighed down the still air with dreadful mourning sobs that sucked the color out of his life.

After coming home from the funeral, still dressed in his Sunday suit, Christian plopped his weary body on the welcoming earth of Ruth’s garden. He smiled at the neighbor’s cat grooming herself in the dwindling sunlight amid the thick clutter of the tomato plants. On the western horizon towering thunderstorms bubbled above the mountains as grey-scudding clouds rushed eastward and the air was damp with the fresh scent of approaching rain. The plunging barometric pressure caused Christian’s head to ache, and he massaged his forehead with the heel of his palm.

Drowning in the memories of their relationship Christian sloshed over with the fiery pain of sorrow. He furiously clawed long, deep furrows into the ground with his fingernails. Despite the agonizing warm swelling in his aching, arthritic knuckles and burning ache along the brittle long bones of his fingers he allowed himself to suffer until the hot, salty tears streaking down his old weathered cheeks and into the corners of his mouth stopped. Christian smeared the tears across his face with the back of both hands and sighed.

A cooling temperature change brought on by the setting of the sun pushed a brisk breeze over the ridges and down the slopes of the mountains and rustled the vegetables, forming rhythmic waves in the tiny forest of corn stalks. The gold and orange leafed branches of an aspen tree, planted near the greenhouse, began to tap an uneven cadence against the glass roof. Christian stretched his long arms towards the heavens and wallowed in the healing stretch of muscles and ligaments through his shoulders, chest, and back. Far above him the clouds finally relented and let loose their burden of rain. Big cold drops plummeted out of the darken sky and thumped into the dirt all around him drenching his clothes. A jagged, multi-branched bolt of lightning, and then another and another, crackled through the air. Rapid firing and cascading blasts of thunder, short violent sounds, like hard fists cracking ribs, overwhelmed his senses.

Through the blur of the rain Christian glimpsed a thatch of gray-streaked auburn hair, then pale blue eyes that expanded into a beautiful face, and finally the most precious possession of his life, his Ruth, straddling the three-legged stool in the midst of the garden. For a brief moment, just as he toppled over and his heart stopped thumping, he experienced something simple, warm, and genuine, his wife’s calloused hands caressing his face.