She built an entire garden for one butterfly. It wasn’t necessarily a special one either, looking exactly like its friends. That didn’t matter to her. She would point to it, arms spread out wide, and say I created this entire world just for you. It was as if they had met in darkness or during a summer afternoon, and the butterfly had shown her how its wing pattern differs from the rest.
Every year, when the greens start to peek through and everything gets a bit brighter, she begins her process. Puts on her gloves and disappears behind the house. She is gone for hours. Mazes are constructed back there, a mess of trees and flowers forming into hidden pathways. Even the smallest ant, she says, sometimes needs a path through the weeds.
When late afternoon arrives, tip-toeing into dusk, she builds a fire with leftover sticks dropped by trees. Summer wind blows through, spraying her red hair backward, hydrangea petals fall like snow.
The garden wakes up just like she does, slowly at first and then all at once. She sits out there, stretching toward the warmth with the goldenrod and daisies, sun spreading itself across the entire scene. Shadows of oak and maple extend across the grass as two squirrels share a breakfast acorn, plotting their later attack on the bird feeder. The ants are building their own version of a castle under the milkweed. Her dog, sitting by her side, is biting the air, trying desperately to remind the mosquitoes he is as much a part of this as they are.
A wild garden intent to revolt. Pinks sneak behind pale whites, dotted every once in a while by a flash of red or a common green. Untrained grass and leftover lettuce remind everyone of a vegetable patch that once was. The wood and wires that once surrounded the vegetables are no longer visible. Roots reach between fences, crossing into neighbors’ yards and creating passageways that mock property lines.
The person who lives next to her, an old man whose silence tells you everything you need to know, has never put much thought into his garden. He has never planted, watered, or watched anything grow. He has one decaying rocking chair and a singular apple tree. She has never judged him for this, simply because she would never want him to judge her. He has an old truck out front that he cleans every morning. It sits as a stark comparison to her beat-up Toyota that she has never washed once. Everyone has their things, she says.
After many years living next to him, his quiet patterns become as familiar as her own. She doesn’t notice the day, some random afternoon in July, when a butterfly flutters in place in front of the man. She doesn’t know that, over the next few weeks, he will be engulfed by unfamiliar sounds that are nothing but familiar to her. The chirping of birds that are just out of sight, the hum of wings moving, the rustle of small things growing and living all around. One garden can never mirror the next, but her and her neighbor’s backyards were now in a conversation with each other that only they could hear. A conversation the two people, living so close to each other’s spaces, had never had.
...
Cycles pass, everything changes and nothing does. The year her son moves across the country, teetering on the edge of mid-twenties, the phlox is a less vibrant shade of pink and the cherry tree doesn’t bloom as dramatically. She decides to take a walk to distract herself from the newfound solitude and to remind her that things keep spinning. Lost in her mind, she almost walks straight into a huge maple tree standing tall in the middle of the road. She looks around, touching the smooth bark, wondering if she has finally gone insane. Instead, she is greeted by an entire neighborhood that has sprouted and sprayed and sprawled. Small trees burst from cracks in pavement, flowers grow out of houses and around old playgrounds. She peers between the holes in fences and sees families and friends spread out across old wooden chairs, laughing. Her world’s separation between plant and person decays, as humans blend into unrestrained greenness.
How silly of her, she thinks, to have expected her butterfly to just stay in her garden.
All photos by Debra Denker
