The talented gardener
I've just taken a trip back in time. Back and forth to my childhood in a split second. I can still feel my feet hanging slightly in the air, and my head is bewildered. The time machine? Well, it wasn't a trip in a time machine. In fact, I traveled in a flower scent. I can't even tell you which flower! I continue curiously examining the garden to my left at the entrance to my building, and I smell the slightly acidic, warm scent again. The smell of a garden that has been watered early in the morning and is now invaded by the early summer sun. It reminds me of the enchanted garden of my childhood.
That was a garden designed to delight all five senses. Neighbors and passers-by would linger for a few minutes on the sidewalk, gazing over the low wall of a house that had nothing special about it. Apart from the garden. The birds and cicadas in the street knew the address well. It was my uncle's house, a controversial personality, but a gardener to the core.
I have a memory, which is more like a Flash, luminous and ephemeral. I contemplate the view from my uncle's bedroom window. I've just woken up and my first desire is to look at the garden on this beautiful summer's day. All the windows in the house are open and the air is circulating, rustling my pajama pants. It's still cool in the house. But in the garden, the bees are buzzing busily over the beds of dandelions and Alyssum, all in bloom, while the bed of roostertails stands silent and imposing like a brood of shy peacocks. It's still early, and the shy eleven o'clock flowers remains closed. Later, when the cicadas proclaim the arrival of the new times, they will be open, showing off in the sun.
Today is Saturday. I've come to spend the weekend at my aunt and uncle's house to enjoy the company of my cousins. But one of my favorite distractions is preparing the seeds. I'm slowly learning all the steps: from repairing the wooden crates that have been made, to filling them with soil, choosing the flower seeds we're going to plant, sticking my greedy finger in the soil to make a hole and put the seeds in, covering them with soil and watering them. Then all we have to do is wait and follow the development of the seedlings step by step, until the day when we can finally transplant them into the flower beds. My gaze, from the top of the window, is the proud gaze of someone who helped create this work of art.
My Flash memory vanishes into thin air and I turn my attention to the garden in front of me, a fake copy of the one from my childhood. Where are all those flowers, bees and cicadas? My neighbors' children, who pass by me with their hoverboards and state-of-the-art scooters in hand, will never help plant gardens as beautiful as my uncle's. I feel sorry for them. A garden is a perpetual source of surprises and delights, unlike a hoverboard.
This memory reminds me of my reaction of amazement in the first few months I lived in Rio de Janeiro. There were many gardens and some well-kept street beds, but there were hardly any flowers. Only luxuriant foliage. The only color in the gardens was limited to the pots of orchids abandoned in the building's rubbish dump by residents when the flowers began to wilt. The plastic pots were then thrown away by the doormen, and the roots and leaves of the orchids were tied to the trunks of palm trees planted in the gardens. Each new bloom of these aftermath orchids was a feast for the eyes and the subject of eternal competition between the doormen for the most beautiful garden on the street.
The day drags on, and I continue to get lost in memories provoked by the scent of a flower that has long since disappeared. I realize that it's been a long time since I last decorated the living room table with a vase of fresh flowers. So I decide to go to the florist and pick out a beautiful bouquet of wildflowers, which I now arrange in a clear glass vase on the table. These flowers are for you, my childhood gardener. God rest your soul. Look, here comes the rain that the cicadas announced earlier!
Voltar