Anca Vlasopolos

        What are you thinking, they want to know. What are you doing, what now, why that, why there, how long, how much, how hard, how soon. All you do is tend a garden out in the open, in front of the house instead of the back. It's as if you've opened shop--come in, for advice, chat, consolation, gratitude, obedience; your mere presence a sign, JUNGIAN PSYCHOTHERAPY, MASSAGE PARLOR, THE SADEAN WOMAN. Only of course you're not selling, and no one's offered to pay, except once, well, maybe twice, but the second offer was hurled as an insult. It is like a shop because you must guard against those who steal and those who abuse what they take to be your merchandise, although you're still not selling.
        Try standing there, motionless. You're not doing anything, just looking at the fruits of your labor--these pigheaded botanicals pushing themselves toward the light. Somebody will come by and ask something. Or say something. Or make a noise, as with a horn. Anything to break your contemplation, because, let's face it, it makes people nervous that there are people in their world with time on their hands to stand still and look at unagitated flowers. Mostly they ask, "What is that?" And sometimes, "Can you give me cuttings/bulbs/roots?" Sometimes they do not ask. You sip your coffee, composing yourself for the day, when you see a well-dressed, well-coiffed woman wearing expensive sun glasses come out of her car, approach your clump of New England asters, and start pulling at them. You stick your head out the window: "What do you think you're doing?" you yell. She starts. She says, "It's the city strip. I didn't think they belonged to anyone." "Oh," you yell back, "Why don't you cut down the tree, or the telephone pole for that matter, for firewood? They're on the city strip, too." She stands with her theft in her hand, whining, "Can't I have these?" "No," you yell, your years of schoolteaching giving your voice the yearned-for authority for once in your life, "Put them down where you found them and leave." In a few minutes, you will go out there, bind the hurt asters, pick up the shoots she'd uprooted, replant them, water them, try to reassure them that you'll guard them against more abuse. But of course you're just saying that, since you can't always be looking out the window. And you're saying that out loud, to plants on the street.
        "Are you always on vacation," says a woman whom you recognize from the grocery store down the street, "'cause I see you out here all the time." "I work out here all the time when I'm out here," you say. "And I work very hard at everything I do, and I do a lot," you say, getting hotter and hotter under the collar, so hot a swallowtail almost lands on your nape to dry its wet, pollen-heavy wings. Well, it is getting later in the day, and the sun has begun to flood the front, which is why there's a lusher garden here than in the back where the trees shadow every piece of ground for hours at a time.
        Or bend over to pick up debris entangled in the thorns of the rosebush. Because they also drop tissues, bags of all sorts, candy wrappers, paper cups, even sanitary napkins, and of course cigarette butts, which they throw into the flower beds with abandon in the ignorant belief that poison is natural and therefore good for the soil, that the butts will disintegrate in less than five years, that you're grateful for their contribution to your organic gardening. Will you ever find the lovelorn note, the scrap of a manuscript that will send you in search of the greatest poet of the age who just happened to pass and drop a magnificent, but to her imperfect, first draft? You do find a lot of legal-looking documents, house closings, property assessments, notices of liens. People are so careless. Perhaps, if you had the time and personality, one day you could start a blackmail business.
        Someone blond and tanned will sneak up to you on sneakers as you bend behind a yew shrub to pull out the deadly nightshade. She scares you witless. "How many hours a week does it take you, to keep all this up," she asks. "I come out here not to look at the clock," you say, having got your aerobic exercise from the fright, heart going at 140 beats a minute and breath short. "But, seriously, how long," she insists. "Let's see," you say. "How long do you spend going to and from your gym?" She turns on her silent heels and relieves you of conversation, so you can start squashing the aphids sucking the tenderest rose leaves. You think, perhaps you should leave a little sprig of belladonna growing somewhere within reach, just in case.
        Your back to the street, you deadhead the coreopsis that spills over the galliardia, smothering it, straighten a lily stem there. A man comes out of the car parked around the corner. He says, "This is beautiful. Many times I go by here, I think of my country. We had gardens on street, like this. I want to tell you, but you not here. Many times I go out of my way to pass by here. Thank you for beauty." He has a gold tooth in front, which glints in the sun. You say, "Thank you."  He says, "No, please, thank you. I want to tell you, thank you." And he goes back to his car, leaving you to mourn for the way that phrase, "my country," which you have never been able to utter without irony or contempt, spurted sweet in his mouth like a chunk of honeycomb. Another day, a fellow older than you, perhaps your age and older looking, sporting a cap at a jaunty angle, riding a no-speed rusty bicycle, shouts out gaily, like the blade he once was, "The only thing more beautiful than these flowers is you, darlin'." You're kneeling at the edge of a bed you're weeding, and you laugh out loud. He taps his cap in your direction. His front teeth are missing, but he smiles from ear to ear. He'll pass by all summer and send these compliments sailing like paper airplanes over plumes of veronica and lavender.
        One day, a neighborhood little girl stops in her walk. She observes you working with a serrated knife, making an outline for another flower plot. She asks, "What are you doing?" You say, "I'm cutting the grass." She looks at you oddly. It dawns on you five beats later that she thinks you're talking about cutting the grass the way her dad cuts the lawn. She goes on, "I like the way you have things here, wild like this. Other people can say it's ugly, but I like it." Now you know what they say, the few who don't feel prompted to speak to you. But so many do.
        One September day, some time after most of the monarchs have started their dreamy navigation across the continent to their secret Mexican resorts, you decide to pull down some overgrown Virginia creeper. You try to spare the vines bearing tiny purple clusters, for the kinglets will come and dart among the leaves and get drunk on these grapes, so the way back to Belize will seem easier. You've dug a hole here next to the fence for the Blaze, a rose that turned from Fair Bianca, an English hybrid, into its hardy, almost wild root; the first summer it put forth a few tentative, blush-tinged white blooms, then the next and the next it came up fighting, burgundy red, seasonal, sending twining canes every which way, looking for something to crawl on. You fight with the creeper, who doesn't want to let go, who takes swings at you as you pull. Why would it not resist? You wish it no good. A woman shouts from a passing car, "Good! I'm glad you're pulling them all down! I can't sleep for all the flowers," as she rounds the corner on two wheels, afraid you'll take off after her. You are tempted. The creeper in your hand would make a handy, sturdy noose. I can't sleep for all the flowers, you muse. You think of her in her upstairs bedroom, tossing, haunted in the night by the moonflower, the cereus, nicotiana releasing a scent so heady it can suffocate a newborn. The woman's gone, and soon so's the creeper, and the rose, which has toughed it through the attempted hybridization, will survive the transplant, will survive much, perhaps you.

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.