The Garden Doors

I’ve gotten in the habit of opening the garden doors in the mornings. Despite the enormous outer walls, the air they let in resuscitates everything (including my mind), and gives a little light too. The mornings are cool and damp, and you need a sweater sometimes, but there is something about letting the outside in. Since it’s not so common where I come from, I’m still getting used to this play between indoors and out. It’s strange the way the outside can transform interiors. In fact, though it’s such a simple thing, and so common here, still I sit marveling at the open threshold, the tress, the grass, all of it right there so close to the where I sit I could spit in the grass. Sure, the bugs get in, but they get in anyway. At least this way you can see them coming! With their white ironwork, and swung clear back to the walls, the doors could almost be a huge bird’s wings, or an angel’s, in flight.

The garden itself lies in a state of desuetude, though still has a humble appeal to the senses. A single rose bush grows there which Cristian is given to smelling frequently, and the only tree in the garden (I still can’t get its proper name out of anyone) is always in bloom with little pointy pink flowers like the tassles on a kid’s knit cap from my U.P. days. The hummingbirds, which are countless, adore them. The black rock strewn around its edge is hideous to look at, and could use replacing. The grass is everywhere overgrown. I fired the gardener too soon, it seems. I’ve been thinking I should buy a machete, which is both tool and weapon of choice in Central American as my friend Dan Miller recently quipped. I believe it would serve me well in this garden, if not elsewhere.