The Rose Garden

Twenty years ago, I ripped up my crabgrass and planted all this. It’s not a full picture, but there are about 50 rose bushes and hundreds of perennials in the front yard alone.

I was—am—proud of that garden. But if I’m going to be honest, it was born out of a rage bordering on hate.

I argued with a neighbor (actress Michelle Pfieffer’s dad, if you can believe it—hi Dick!) when I was out of work and under stress. He noted the sad-sack nature of my yard, and I didn’t take it well.

I vowed to myself—with the kind of self-pity and indignance reserved for enraged little boys and too-proud men—that I’d make him eat his words.

And I did, eventually.

It was the kind of yard people would slow down and stop to look at, the kind that people around the area would drive past to take a peek. I was puffed up about it.

There’s no way Dick is alive anymore; even if he was, I bet he’d be hard-pressed to remember our argument. Objects in the rear-view mirror really are smaller than they first appear.

But if those events in the past are they’re smaller, then they also manage to retain—at least for me, at least in my heart—a sharp outline. A reminder that it’s not hard at all to do a good thing for bad reasons.

These days, I’m fixing up my house in Missouri and, eventually, planning to move back. And I’ve got a big, empty front yard.

I might plant a garden out there, or maybe not. The 30 and 50 are far enough apart that such projects are sometimes calculated in terms of how many bends and sore-knee sessions they’ll create.

But whatever I plant, at some level, I want to plant in honor of the guy I never knew well and had a meaningless argument with.

It’s not that I owe him that much; it’s that I probably owe myself the experience of tending a living thing for some reason other than spite.

Greg W. Brooks. First published on Facebook, June 23, 2015.