When they ripped up the gardens our mothers planted in the empty space behind the Project 8 housing where even the greedy centipede grass did not dare grow, they did not pave over the pale earth with asphalt, nor did they add to its pallor with concrete. No, they ripped up our gardens, and they poured bleach into the dirt so that nothing would grow there.
I asked my mother if this is what it was like when the Romans salted the fields of Carthage, and she did not believe I had not made it up because she'd never heard of it.
It was just another day in a place where everything had to fit inside its assigned box: fences around a community, bars around a window, forms stacked around an emptiness that wanted to be fulfilled, as long as it wasn't fulfilled too easily to take advantage of.
There would be no buckets full of beans. The only thing we snapped with our fingers that season were blocks of Maruchan noodles before we dropped them into the boiling pot. We watched them uncurl, and we remembered how the curling sprigs of green sought out our fingers as they ascended.
There would be no zucchini or squash stacked in jars so high in the back of the cabinet that we would be eating them all winter and many winters to come. There was expired canned goods from the food pantry at the Baptist church stacked so the food seemed six-feet deep. The garden gave to us freely; the church gave only to those who tithed.
There would be no potatoes to sprout spuds in the darkness of the cupboard. All we had was mothers who came home at dusk with bags full of french fries, and we would call this a home cooked meal because some nights, the dollar menu was all she could afford, and she did not deserve to be disrespected after all her hard work led her to this: a bag full of potato seeds in the back of the freezer and nowhere to plant them.
We looked around, first at one another, then at ourselves, and last, at the hot and humid sun shining down upon the barren earth. There was no seed sown to drink in the light and the water. The gifts of the earth and the sky wasted like a drunk uncle.
There was too much room for us here,
And nothing to fill the emptiness.
CS Crowe is a storyteller from the Southeastern United States with a love of nature and a passion for writing. He believes stories and poems are about getting there, not being there, and he enjoys those tales that take their time getting to the point.
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