It’s four in the morning and I’ve just woken up in a puddle of my own sweat. The mix matched blankets and naked pillows are strewn all over the bed. This is it, the aftermath of the second dose has finally taken my body and I must bear all the pain and horribleness for the greater good of humanity. Don’t say I never did anything for you. I sit up, groggily trying to piece together where I am. I see darkness and not much else. The five dollar mini fan from Walgreens sits to the left of me and I turn it off. I fumble with the red cap of the Tylenol bottle and take a big gulp of water from my Stonehenge souvenir cup. I fall back asleep dreaming of home.
The first image I get when I think about home is my kitchen from the the top of the stairs. I can see my mom by the electric stove with her ear-pods in and her phone propped up against the salt shaker. I can see my brother wearing an apron, washing the dishes. I can see the tiny plant pots lined up on the window sill, the compost bin filled with used coffee grains and egg shells, the young seedling heads poking out of the dirt in my mother’s favourite broken cup.
For as long as I remember, I have grown up alongside wild things. From the moment we arrived here, in our little 2 bedroom apartment, my parents raised plants and turtles; fruits and fish; alive beings that were not human, but needed human things, water, shelter, food, and love. Throughout the years, as our family roots dug deeper and our homes got bigger, so did our gardens. Our kitchen turned into laboratories where my mother would experiment with different seeds. Our living room turned into a greenhouse, because my parents would pick up any plant they saw at the stores or abandoned in the streets. Our backyard turned into jungles of infinite possibilities.
In many ways, gardening was a way for my parents to remember the homes they left behind while teaching me and my brother things they could not communicate through spoken language. Growing up as a child of immigrants, language had always been the primary barrier between us and them. Misunderstandings turned into fights, jokes turned into explanations which turned into a sigh. The garden was a place where we could be together with very few words, “shovel this”, “water that”, “Yaya, Joe, come look”. It was a place where the hard things like I love you or I’m proud of you, didn’t need to be said, but we felt them nonetheless, through a pat on the back or a slice of homegrown watermelon.
