The First Days of February
It’s the first days of February, and the Meyer lemons in the backyard are waiting to be picked. The thyme, parsley, oregano, and French tarragon are filling in nicely, but the rosemary might be getting too much water. The cilantro seedlings need thinning - maybe tomorrow, if I have the time - and the lone baby fennel bulb finally seems to be taking root. The leaf lettuces planted in fall have all bolted after the several days of heat these last two weeks, but honestly, we weren’t really eating them anyway. I’ll pull them soon enough, but in the meantime I like the look of them - like spindly little spiral towers reaching toward the sky to broadcast their seeds to the wind before they finally dry out.
A well-meaning friend once asked me why bother gardening when you can just buy all these things from the market? And after months of watering and babying and tending, only to get a few sad beets or peppers or tomatoes, I ask myself the same question all the time.
I spent summers with my sister and cousins at my Baachan and Jii-jii’s house in Harbor City when I was a kid. Every morning before us kids woke up, my Jii-jii, in spite of a stroke that paralyzed his left side, would make his way to and from a small patch of soil between the concrete walkway to the back two units of the triplex they owned and managed, and a chain-link fence separating their property from the neighbors to the south. He was a gardener by trade - his family owned and ran a nursery near the Venice-area before they were shipped off to an internment camp in Jerome, Arkansas during World War II.
I remember the perfect-looking eggplants that would magically appear in the kitchen during the summer heat. He rarely, if ever, spoke to us kids, but seeing what he could conjure out of that small, modest patch of earth between the concrete and chain-link, was enough to pique my interest and plant the seed for my own gardening journey years later.
Gardening now, in my small corner of this sprawling metropolis, is connection to that - to him, to my family, to the rhythms of the days and seasons.
