gardens

Bungalows have a slender sidewalk from the back porch to the alley.  It is less than a yard between it and the fence that you can lean over if you choose to talk to your neighbors.  And that is where Mom grew tomatoes.  She grew flowers around the yard also but I never had much interest in them.  You know, they don't do anything.  Tomatoes you can eat right off the vine and one summer Mom tied a little salt shaker to the fence and how cool was that?

They also attracted tomato caterpillars (tomato hornworms wiki calls them). My dour Czech grandpa, when he visited would pluck them from the vines, toss them to the sidewalk and take inordinate pleasure in squashing them on the sidewalk.  Kind of disturbing, but a little cool in a young boy's eyes.  I remember them as having green blood.

Well time passes and I grew up and went to school.  In Herrin, doing my CO I tried to grow a sunflower outside my trailer but the landlord's daughter (the landlord's beautiful daughter) mowed it down.  I finished my CO, went back to Champaign, tended bar, lived here and there and somewhere in the mid seventies I moved into an apartment next to a vacant lot, and something from twenty years ago next to the fence between bungalow neighbors was reborn in me, and I grew a garden.

It was pretty big, maybe twenty by thirty feet.  I grew everything you can buy a seed for at the garden store.  Lettuce. radishes, carrots, onions, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kohlrabi. corn, tomatoes, and peppers.  One summer I grew okra, but never knew how to cook it so I let it flower and it was very pretty.

The garden did well at the beginning of the season, but the deeper it got into summer the fiercer became the weeds, also the sun beating down on me when I pulled them, so somewhere around late July I just surrendered it and it became a jungle.

Which did not please the guy next door who owned the lot who stopped by late in the third year of my garden and said, "Son, you can have it for the rest of the year, but don't plant it again next year."

I had no yard in Texas, when I came back and lived in my parents' attic I didn't feel right in asking for a plot of land.  When I moved to the apartment on LaSalle there was nothing like a yard.

A great attraction of Marina City was those big beautiful balconies.  I moved in on Columbus Day 1992, and after the hauling was done I took a folding chair out on the balcony and admired my magnificent view, and thought about lining that whole area by the railing with pots.