He built a garden for her.
Eight by three feet, rectangular. Hugelkultur, but inside a raised bed. Contained. Neat. Two by fours and repurposed aluminum storm shutters, no longer needed since he bought the reinforced windows. Use what you have. Drip irrigation all around. Don’t want the bed drying out in the winter. Have a plan when you can’t count on the rain. Steer things back when they get out of control.
First a six-foot-deep hole, perfectly shaped – eight by three to fit the bed. Only a few hours work in the sandy soil. Then Della, his wife. Maybe some palm fronds between to cushion the earth. On top of that, build a mound with logs and some larger branches. Yard clippings and compost – the perfect wet-to-dry ratio of kitchen scraps and outdated bank statements. Good paper not gone to waste, clean, shredded back to essence. Top it all with soil. Plant the soil with something practical and edible: neat rows of chard, maybe some alliums. Carrots are a possibility.
* * * * *
Deep down under the deep deep, the light is faint, maybe nonexistent. Open up your eye. Feel what you see. It’s warm here. A gentle humming. Mandibles munch at roots. A thousand toothless wigglers consume and transform the dark around you. Millions more, humming and milling, beneath your perception. Their dance is a pulse, is a circle –inhale/exhale, grasp/release, devour/expel – and you find yourself dancing with them, in your slow way, as you feel your boundaries and your borders. You find yourself dancing with them, in your waking up. In your dreams, in your not-quite-real, you open different eyes, seeing different faces. A man. Questions with wrong answers. Choices, mistakes. Rows overflowing order. So much pain. But here in the dark are wooden arms. You’d stretch to meet them – your own arms empty, ache – but palms stroke a cheek, gentle. Shhhh, wait, is the whisper. It’s nearly time. And so you lie. Above there is swaying and shuffling and sighing. Around you, threads prickle and sew through root and soil. Electric sparks connect: a primitive dial tone, a phonograph scratch. Silver hands stitch a cobweb caul across your face. And – suddenly – you laugh.
You are born.
You witch, you beautiful witch.
* * * * *
In a witches garden there is light and dark, waxing and waning, birth and death, growth and decay: all things in their time. A garden is like a life, is like a marriage. It’s messy. There are causes and effects. Especially when you are growing organically, using homemade compost from the pile over at the edge of the woods – the perfect wet-to-dry ratio of kitchen scraps and decaying leaves and papers shredded back to essence – surprises creep up: strange inedible mushrooms, a volunteer tomato, sweet potatoes you didn’t intend to plant.
A wise woman knows when to grow and when to cull. She knows the difference between bitter medicine and sweet poison, and the moment for each. If you were someone inclined to order, to superficially setting things right; if you lived with a willful blindness to the unexpected and the wild – you might end up in a lot of trouble without the benefit of her guidance.
For example, you might not know: wild carrots (Daucus carota), both above and below ground, resemble the poisonous perennial hemlock (Conium maculatum), and death camas (Toxicoscordion venenosum) are often mistaken, by the uninitiated, for wild garlic (Allium ursinum).
The chard in this garden, however, is just chard, and is perfectly okay to eat.
Words and photo © Jaime Greenberg, 2021
