Summer

The backyard is unbelievably lush. I always dreamed while passing quaint little gardens that I might one day live amidst such.

I now live amidst such.

Every inch of this yard has a purpose: Lettuce along the bedroom side of the house, potatoes growing in an island in the front yard, strawberries in a patch in front of the muscadine vines, a melon patch against the fence, a long, straight bed of beans running parallel to the creek, peppers planted in a semi-circle around the mud pond, corn rows lined up within the homemade fence, and a regular garden blossoming in the middle - as if this were Eden.

Not that I ever meant to actually garden or sweat or harvest. I, apparently, planned only to eat of the fruit of the forbidden tree.

Plus also, I thought myself incapable of nurturing plants after my failure in the first grade to coax a cup of snap dragon seeds to thrive. I was so disappointed, I thought, "Of course mine didn't grow." Which is what I have believed to this day (even while surrounded by verdant evidence to the contrary).