Watching the birds take dirt and water baths in the garden has been fun for me. In just one year we’ve turned this garden around from seemingly dead soil to nicer soil full of worms and bugs, which is attracting birds. The bird bath has brought birds we previously had never seen in this neighborhood before: the American goldfinch and the house finch. So far we’ve spotted monarch, yellow swallowtail, black swallowtail, and white cabbage butterflies in the garden, as well as lots of bees, ladybugs, and hoverflies.
After my two encounters with the lady whose husband owns the building next door, I consoled myself with the fact that it doesn’t matter what she thinks, the garden isn’t for her. The garden is for us and for the critters who are already benefiting from it. In her world, there is always someone on the bottom and someone standing on top of that person. She needs to be the person on top. She also cannot understand doing something for nothing. If there’s nothing in it for her, she won’t do it. So this whole project short circuits her brain. Her rationale is that we are somehow employed by our friend, with whom we’ve been co-ordinating on the garden project.
Thankfully, she seemed satisfied after our last conversation. She was so hostile and rude at our first meeting, I thought we were going to be shut down. She reminded me of my underlingness and her power that she thinks she has. She can cope with us working in the garden, which is half hers because she owns that building, only if she thinks we are working for our friend to improve the grounds for his business. She will be the first to admit that the garden was left unkempt for so long that it was an eye sore, but since it was our landlord’s turn to pay for the landscaping and upkeep, she wasn’t about to do anything herself beyond complaining about it.
It didn’t matter how I explained our true relationship to our friend or how we had our landlord’s permission to do whatever we wanted in the garden. I could see that she needed to see this situation as us being our friend’s employees in order to cope with it. She thinks now that she is getting a bargain, landscaping that she doesn’t have to pay for, and that we are working for our friend. As long as she stays out of my way, she can think whatever she wants.
Then we moved the brick pathway. I’m not sure why, but somehow my working alongside Eric was funny to people who were out that weekend. So many people were laughing at me. One guy actually laughed in my face. I worked just as hard as Eric and I pulled my own weight. Eric said my tan is more attractive than other ladies around here, because mine is the result of working long, hard hours outdoors, not lounging on the beach or lying in a tanning salon.
The front flower bed is nearly finished, but I’m running out of steam. At one point, Eric and Johann quit. After their much-needed break, they came back and helped again, but now I’m getting burned out. And I’m tired of being laughed at by people who are walking by while I’m tending the garden. It takes a lot of energy to ignore them. Working class people are treated so poorly here.
But then Johann spotted a female monarch in our garden. She was attracted to our butterfly weed most of all. I ran to get Eric and we all watched her with fascination. Also, a handful of nice people have come by in the last week. They each said how they’ve been watching us working and recognize the hard work we are putting into the garden. They love what we’ve done so far. They are impressed with how we did the pathway. That sure helped me. I was feeling so discouraged, that I decided I really do want to find a remote place the three of us can go to where we live so far out, that we only see other people if we travel for days to get to the nearest town. The ultimate compliment and reward was that the female monarch came to our garden like she did. We aren’t even finished creating our backyard butterfly and hummingbird habitat and she chose our garden in which to lay an egg.
