Doughnut Garden

Exercise: Describe someone watching someone else doing something he/she should not be doing. At some point, write, "But what I've always wondered is," and continue with the action. 

The goldenrods that grow at the edge of the soccer field are not like the ones in A Guide to Naming Herbs. Their stems are not thin and straight, but are swollen at the nape with spherical bulbs, and the plants arch their backs as pregnant women do. Here is the poetry: within each bulbous swelling, or gall, nestles the beginning of a goldenrod gall fly. And though the fly eats its host from inside and eventually emerges with the plant's death, I like to think that the maggot is not gnawing away during its months of seclusion, but merely dreaming in suspension, safely unborn in its womb.  

I was heading down the path to these goldenrods when I saw this little girl of about five or six hunched beneath them, the tall stems bowed over her protectively like a domed womb. Her disheveled appearance, to be expected when children her age are permitted to play outdoors, did not suit her. Rather, stick in hand, she shoveled with a intentness that indicated she was not there for child's play, but had been charged with some sort of mission that needed to be executed with the deliberation of an architect planning the hanging gardens of Babylon. The intensity of her concentration fascinated me, and when I peered through birdwatching binoculars to observe her, she paused and looked up, as though my presence had somehow disrupted her sacred work. 

She tossed the twig aside and rummaged through her backpack, rummaged until she gave up and turned it upside down, the contents spilling out beneath the green roof. A tattered folder, a spelling book and  a sweater too heavy for late summer, and then she had it--a handful of Cheerios in a Ziploc bag. She crouched over the garden bed she had fashioned and sowed her crop, patting soil over each golden-colored O with surprising gentleness for one who had just been tilling the earth with such ferocity. As she wiped her hands on the back of her I could feel the thrill of dirt beneath my nails.

The week before dad left, I planted Fruit Loops in my mother's squash garden. Two months of summer vacation had exhausted my usual pastimes, and after flipping through one of the gardening magazines in the bathroom while on the search for something to color, I decided to turn to gardening. It occurred to me that if cabbage seeds could sprout into cabbages, why couldn't the Fruit Loops I ate on the mornings mother didn't feel like getting up (and dad had not come home yet) become doughnuts? While my mother slept, I poked holes in the dark, crumbly earth, dropping multicolored O's into the shallow indentations as I went, occasionally licking the sweetness from my fingers. 


When my mom and I got home from Grandma's that Saturday, his car was gone. The cabinet in the master bedroom no longer held his crumpled handkerchiefs and gray-white socks. The photograph of me in my Sunday best at the local farmer's market had vanished from the telephone stand, and his favorite armchair no longer sagged against the living room wall. Once I realized the armchair was gone, the one my mother had despised because it clashed with everything else in the house, the one he loved precisely for that reason, I went out into backyard and tore up the garden with a shovel. I moved systematically from row to row, Demeter in her wrath, crushing gourds and cabbages as my mother watched from the kitchen window. 


But when I saw the Fruit Loops that lay exposed in the overturned earth, I lay down the shovel and began picking my crop out of the carnage. I searched from one end of the garden to the other six or seven times, crawling through vegetable innards and casting aside fistfuls of dirt until the smell of death and fertilizer clung to my fingers, until I had retrieved every single one. I cupped the still dormant doughnut seeds in my hand and rattled and breathed on them the way I rattled and breathed on dead batteries when I willed them to work.


The screen door creaked. I felt my mother kneel beside me. "These won't grow, honey," she whispered, closing her hands around mine, and I cried then, as we rocked back and forth in the cabbage leaves, the casualty of our ruined garden around us. I knew then that some things could not be planted, and others could not be saved.

So I could imagine what those Cheerios were. Gold coins to be discovered on a later treasure hunt. Gifts of friendship for the gnomes living underground. Seeds for a doughnut garden. I once sowed my own crop, and am content to leave the meaning of those mounds to her. 

But what I have always wondered since that day is why she chose the goldenrods for her shelter. Why she chose to deposit her treasure so far from her mom's vegetable garden, so obscured from the rest of the world; why she planted her garden in secret. What did she already know? What had been said, what inauspicious warnings of "That's not the way doughnuts are made, dear" had been given to make her sense that this was the only way, kneeling alone in a green womb, dreaming flies suspended overhead? Perhaps she needed solitude as much as I did, needed to be nestled away from the oppressiveness of knowing, secure in the sweetness of a world where doughnuts are not made but grown, with apple juice and a handful of Cheerios in a Ziploc bag.