When we first saw our apartment, we were giddy over the gigantic back yard. Despite the steep slope because we are on a hill, we thought of the playing possibilities for the kids. You also have to use your imagination here and picture this field with a lot of tall grass... the kind you could flatten to make paths from one kid-lair to another. The kind of tall grass that made the field seem 10 times larger than it really was because when you would lay on your belly, you would only see grass, not the unsightly cinder-block wall.
Well, as it turned out, this was not our back yard, but simply an empty lot next door. Over the year, we watched the grass grow taller, a tree would take root here or there, and throughout the dry "rainy" season that we had last year, it changed from green to yellow to brown.
Until last spring, just before the rains came back. Manuel, a man who is the care-taker for a home across the street, spent several days cutting the grass and preparing the slope for his garden. Then he planted the empty lot full of corn. He also planted the empty lot next to his house. He planted every vacant dirt patch near the house that he could find with corn, beans and squash.
These are the guards helping out by weeding the corn one morning before work.
Now the vegetables of his labors are coming to fruit. This is not just happening around us in our
colonia, but all over the city. Squash plants are sending out their little, yellow trumpets which are playing second fiddle only to the Paul Bunyan sized corn plants. Hundreds of thousands of
capitolinos are getting by, nutritionally, with their jigsaw gardens strategically placed around their homes and places of work. It makes me miss my garden boxes in our old sweet, little yard in town. I'll just have to make do these days with the rosemary, basil and some other mystery herb growing on our balcony.
