A Tale of Two Gardens

A short story 

by Marino Apollinari

Two gardens sat diagonally from each other. The gardens measured approximately 500 square feet. On any given summer, the gardens produced tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, peas, beans, and garlic. At the corner fence, two retired immigrants from San Marino stood facing each other, sometimes speaking Italian, other times broken English. What was not broken was their work ethic or knowledge of their craft. Using nothing more than shovels and rakes to till the earth and keep the gardens weed-free, they created the ideal environment for crops to flourish and their harvest to be plentiful. These gardeners understood the importance of rotating their crops, digging a hole, and adding compost made from uneaten food scraps to enrich the soil. Some years, they had to battle through droughts, spending their mornings and evenings hand-watering. In other years, they had to manage too much rain. The gardeners' skin was tanned to the extent of their work.

They weren't the only ones with a strong work ethic. Their wives collected the harvest as it ripened. Washing and cleaning ripe tomatoes, picking cucumbers that were just the right size, and selecting zucchini at their deepest color. Before this, they were in the kitchen, kneading the dough, preparing the sauce, cooking ingredients every day so that their husbands could fuel themselves for the next day. They wanted nothing for themselves — not because the want was missing, but because each day they spent it on the people they fed, and never once thought to spend it otherwise. You didn't see fast-food bags or individual wrappers in their houses because they didn't eat junk food.

You didn't hear these people brag to one another about their work. They were friends. They shared camaraderie and strategies to improve harvests. They weren't college-educated in agriculture. They learned their skills from their parents, who learned the same from theirs back in San Marino. They brought those skills with them to the United States of America in search of a better life and to start and raise a family. However, as the seasons passed, the gardens became a little smaller, and a little smaller, and a little smaller. Four people at the fence became three. Three people became two. Two people became one. Eventually, one of the gardens was seeded with grass, and the area within the former garden grew visibly greener than its surroundings, fed by the still highly fertile soil. The other garden was overgrown with native grass and weeds.

No grandsons took up the spade. The garden across the fence is being brought back now by new immigrants — the same work, the same patience. The other garden was seeded over with grass, and only the soil remembers it, greener than everything around it. The hands that should have kept it were mine, and I turned them to something else. What my grandparents left me was never the garden itself. It was the way they kept it — the mornings that started before the heat, the sauce built from nothing on the stove, the craft that no one wrote down and no one bragged about. I carried that out of their yard and into my own work. My garden does not sit behind a fence or wait for the season. The soil is harder, the rows are my own, and the harvest comes slowly. But it is tended every day by the same kind of hands. What has grown from it is the work documented here. 

Some of the wording in this story was created or edited using ChatGPT, Claude, and Grammarly.