I found garden plot 114 this week. It is a large enclosed space of nothing but weeds and branches. I look at it lovingly. Weeds and branches.  I am overjoyed to have it.

Perhaps it is because I have never owned a piece of land that these feelings have been awakened in me.  I feel like Scarlett O'Hara standing in the middle of Tara. I am filled with pride and determination. I open the rickety gate that separates my garden with the hundred or so other gardens and  let myself in.

It is a tangled jumble of weeds.  I yank up stalks of old rosemary and oregano. I dig out old onions and scallions and mint. The previous owners were good in the kitchen no doubt. They have left a lot for me to clear. I think of the meals they created with their choices of herbs.  I imagine them with sprigs of rosemary left on their dinner plates. I decide they are a young professional couple. Lawyers perhaps. They tend their plot on weekends to ease the stress of life in the city. A city teeming with other stressed young and not so young professionals. I imagine they have a small child. They are careful to feed him only nutritious food. When the second baby arrives, they mash the carrots from their garden one last time before they buy a house in the suburbs. 

I work silently. Digging. Pulling weeds. Inhaling the smell of earth.

I am peaceful for the first time in months. Utterly peaceful as I dig my shovel into the dirt with my foot. I am hypnotized by the sound of shovel meeting ground; a sound that tunes out the stories in my head.

I am not pretending I am Mother Earth today.  No goddess of all things that grow. I stop inventing stories about the couple with the two children. I only hear the sound of the shovel hitting the dirt.

 I am quiet and reverent and humbled.  

Dig. Pause. Breathe.  

Garden Plot #114