School Days

“How’s your garden doing?” Asabi asked me.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in three days.”

Asabi works with me at the computer lab in the college of education helping students scan images and convert files and upload assignments so professors can check them. She and I became friends over the summer when we co-taught the class that teaches students how to do these things. Asabi had heard I had a garden, and kept a watchful eye towards any surplus produce.

“Collard greens!” she had exclaimed, “You all have collard greens?”

Yes. I had. And plenty to share, altho she and I never managed to get the sharing done.

I’m not a very energetic gardener. I prefer to let things take their own course for the most part. This inhibits certain kinds of garden success. In the summer I spent a lot of time in the garden, standing in the heat and imitating the plants, soaking up the sun. Sometimes I would make a mental list: should ought put that fence back up, might could weed the carrots, need some sort of trellis for the peas. The list was mental only, without any physical manifestation. Like I said, my gardening isn’t very energetic.

Now that school is in session, from Sunday night until Thursday night, I’m not home in the daylight.

Weeds have been a problem this year. We’ve had a lot of rain and the weeds keep… shooting up like weeds. The Saturday before Asabi had asked me this, I had plunged into the weedy mess with resolve. The day before I had simply stood and stared, wondering where my vegetables were. It was a mess, enough of a mess to put off dealing for as long as I could.

And then, that was it. Cut down a bunch of weeds and run off to study. Leave the garden to its own devices. It feels somehow that without me standing there to watch it, it must be going to have problems growing. Or something. It needs me.

I soak up fluorescent light from the school and the flat screen monitor glow from the lab and grow pasty and pale. And the plants. The plants and the weeds soak up the rain and remains of the southening sun and dispute my claims of relevance to the whole operation.