What if the neighbor had heard me talking about the Secret Garden? What if she was just biding her time? What if she was holding out until the next manic episode or drug binge or whatever it is that makes her so hyper in the latter third of almost every month? What if in three weeks I came back to find my corn seedlings ripped out of the ground and the tomato plants destroyed? What if she destroyed everyone else’s garden and they all blamed me for being a Typhoid Mary, a Jonah who brought the curse down on the whole neighborhood project? What if they sent me away and gave my Three Sisters patch to somebody else?ĭrag the barrow, turn, tilt, dump, return to the mound.
I turned around backwards and pulled rather than pushed the load to the planter, turned again, tilted it, dumped, and went back to the mound.
#One piece world seeker outfits full#
The barrow was full of warm, fragrant compost. Sometimes I think of my anxiety as a demon who looks like me, knitted to my soul by that fake superstitious Virgin Mary. That ghastly monster of a Virgin Mary was the sort of image I grew up with. The innocent person would suffer the agonies of hell their entire lives, but in the end the demon would be cast into the eternal fire and that victim soul would go to Heaven. I think about that one snippet of a book by an exorcist that was circling social media recently: the book claimed that the exorcist had firsthand knowledge of the Virgin Mary sometimes attaching multiple demons to a victim on purpose, so the demons could be punished by contact with an innocent person.
I think about the books about saints who were victim souls, and claimed the Lord Jesus was torturing them out of love, scourging their minds with agonies so that souls could be saved from the Divine wrath. I keep thinking back to the terrible books we hoarded about the worst quasi-Catholic superstitions, growing up. I wish I could bury her alive and walk away without her. I wish with all my heart I could cut the cord and send her flying off into space. I picture the anxiety as another Mary standing next to me, immaterial, partly transparent, connected to my body by an umbilical cord. The only intruders were a few friendly robins, treating the warm bare earth as their buffet.Īs I worked, I worried. My planters standing ready for tomatoes and sunflowers. The wilted heap of weeds I’d pulled on Saturday. The triumphant pile of logs where there had once stood a scrubby old tree growing through the chain link, blacking out the sunlight. The mound of earth, with one chunk taken out of it as if a giant had bitten it. On the way to the garden, I began to catastrophize: what if the neighbor had found out about the Community Garden? What if she decided to destroy it somehow, just as she destroyed my old garden? What if I turned the corner and found my refuge had been torn apart, the raised beds reduced to kindling, the compost scattered, my seed potatoes in their planter torn to shreds, the filth from her detested German Shepherd smeared all over everything just as she’d done to our porch?īut when I got there, everything was just as I’d left it. I pushed it right past the door to the evil menacing neighbor’s house, but she didn’t stir.