Two Points of View

Abandoned homesteads are not an unusual sight in rural areas. Over the years, simple clapboard farmhouses are left behind for all sorts of reasons. There is an old home place for sale nearby which is slowly disintegrating into it's original elements. Over the years I have watched as the modest garden planted and tended so long ago by the woman of the house continued to bloom despite the steady encroachment of the wilder world. In some mysterious form of swap, when the grasses and shrubs began to crowd in usurping the gardens original boundaries, volunteers from the garden began springing up along the ditch by the road. Man made boundaries are meaningless in the Real World.  It was a heartening sight to see their brave little faces. Even the usual 'no exceptions' county maintenance road crew skirted around them.

This Spring the garden reached the point where it was obvious the plants put there so long ago would finally be swallowed up. I felt a tug at my heart each time I drove by.  One morning I could stand it no longer.  The property had been derelict for years I rationalized. No one cared about that garden anymore, much less all the effort of caring and tended by the woman who planted it so long ago, so I gathered my short shovel and trowel and clambered up the hill to the front yard of the house feeling guilty for trespassing but doing it anyway.  The wild privet was up to the roof, the grasses thick with crickets and butterflies and hidden canes of blackberry.  But when I reached what was left of the garden, I found profusely blooming, clump after clump of  rose companion, each tall silvery spire crowned with the most unbelievably intense magenta star.  I sank my shovel into the loamy soil intent on my mission to save a few clumps when suddenly a hard gruff voice called out from the road: "Do you have permission to do that?"

Be still my heart. I stopped and looked up at the man standing there, who had seen me on his morning walk.  A thousand lies went through my head and then something in me came alive. "No I do not", I said as I straightened up, "but this little garden that some woman planted years and years ago is going to be leveled and forgotten when this land sells.  I am saving some of these plants." I stared him down. " Is that okay with you?"  There was a moment while he considered and then, he walked on.  I quickly finished and as we say around these parts: skee-dattled.

A few days later I stopped again, this time though along the edge of the road below the house.  The digging is much harder and rockier but I was feeling remorseful and these plants were on the road right of way.  As I wrestled with the briars and rocky soil, out of nowhere a car pulls up and stops. This time it was a woman.  I stood up,  ready to give my excuses, when she rolled down her window smiling and said: "You know, I do that all the time.  I even went up into the garden of the homestead.  You know the woman who put in that garden must have loved plants. I could not bear to let them get swallowed up."

Be still my heart again--but this time for a different reason.  She introduced herself, shared some recent plant finds and drove off, as a new friend.

Yes, I know there are laws about trespassing but this was not an act in defiance of them.  This little adventure is about something far more important. All over the world there is fighting over who gets to own what, when the truth is none us will ever be anything more than renters. The great challenge of our times is for us to realize that we all have a right to be here, that there is so much worth saving and caring for all around us, ourselves included and that whether or not that happens  may all come down to our point of view.