The Unintended Garden
By Daniel Holland Slapping wet dirt from her reddened fingers, she stood again, propping a shaky palm on her lower back as the riptide of aches and pains skittered across it. “Why am I doing this?” she asked aloud to no one and pressed her sun-faded bandana to her forehead, catching a runaway dribble of sweat. Her young neighbour passed with a bouncy poodle, the white curls about its collar swirling a little in the new breeze. “Looks like a whole new world,” the girl mused, beaming up at Jamie from the sidewalk below. Resetting her feet on the slope, Jamie contemplated her work—this hillside that she’d been standing and sitting and kneeling and digging on for two days now. Once a mound of dried, brownish ivy that acted more like a wired fence than a welcome mat for her Santa Monica apartment complex, now it was… what exactly? A sea of jade, cactus and aloe of every size and shape--that’s what it was. Some plants had long intricate names that she couldn’t even pronounce, and mos...