The Foundation

I didn't know it, when I first stepped off the neglected dirt pathway, through the rickety old gate, and into the overgrown garden, but I was stepping back in time. I was entering a world where love had lived, where love had pushed through the hard surface of a resistant heart and change the structure of a universe.

My mother was a slight woman. She had always been thin and fragile. Her fragileness wasn't skin deep. Its roots ran deep, past her pale skin and fair blue eyes, past her frame, reaching down through her bones and into her soul. It was the fragileness and strength of love. I missed that gentle woman I had learned to call mom. I longed for one more moment in her arms. I craved her comfort. My broken heart yearned to be healed by the love only a mother can dispense. But now there were no more mothers.

Standing here in her world, I could almost smell her earthy skin and see the dirt under her nails. My mother could grow anything. She could put a tire in the ground and grow a car. She could plant a seed of love in a child's broken heart and grow a dream.

The roses and lilies were still thriving. I walked past the daisies, treaded over the broken planks on the steps, through the threshold, and into the musty living room. I remembered that room, or maybe I only remembered the feeling of the room. I reminisced the day I first arrived, tears streaming down my young cheeks, my white knuckles clutching the plastic Walmart grocery bag containing all my belongings. The bruises and breaks that pass my skin and punctured my heart.

She had taken in the imp no one else wanted and patiently loved the boy who was rejected by everyone else. The boy that had purposefully lived up to the name of Troublemaker and Menace, he had been given. The boy that had receded so far into himself that there was nothing left of the innocence of childhood. But that never stopped her. She loved so fiercely that the walls of a mighty kingdom couldn’t have withstood such ferocity. She decided I was hers and there was nothing I could do about it.

I had rejected her. I pushed her away, emotionally and physically. I refused to take a chance. A damaged heart won’t easily open. I knew I wouldn’t be here for long. I never was. But I was wrong. She wouldn’t let me leave. She claimed me as her own. It took a year before I would finally speak, and two more before the gentle tending of the garden in my heart would bear the fruit of love.

The years I spent as her son were the foundation of a new era, a creation of a reality I never knew existed. She poured love into my being. She bestowed grace of character into an empty shell, filling it to overflowing with a new hope, generating in me the ability to share what I was given, and pour it into other empty hearts. By the time I was old enough to leave and make my mark on the world, I had learned to look into other injured hearts and bandage their wounds with the same unconditional love. Was this why I was chosen to be one of the one thousand-seven? Certainly, there were other doctors who were more qualified.

Mom had been one of the last to be infected by the virus. The Visitors had annulated our world. Unintentionally or not, it had happened, and millions were lost. Their coming to this world devastated our existence. Our only consolation was that we had infected them with our own diseases, and they were gone now too. Was that a good thing? Had they come to conquer and destroy? We will never know.

My mother would have thought the best of them, of anyone or anything. “We're only passing stranger here,” she always said. I could almost hear her weak voice repeating those often spoken words as she fingered the broken locket she always wore around her neck. It was my first gift to her… to anyone. From the time I gave it to her, she never took it off.

“I’m a missionary in this land of pain. It’s my job to love the hurting and grow as much beauty as these old bones will allow. It’s what the Master Gardener commands.” Did she know her foundation would form a new world? I would rename this place Graceland.

This place was mine now. This place, This town. This continent, if I wanted it. There was no one to object. Only a few of us survived. Seventeen of those who had left to populate Mars, had returned to repopulate Earth. Life has its ironies.

I walked past the rickety gate, through the garden, and into the house. There was magic here. Not in the rich soil where Mom’s flowers still thrived, not in the broken steps that had been the gateway to this house of healing. Not even in the floating soot that glittered like enchanted fairy-dust captured in sunlight. But in the love that painted the very air, the love she planted in my fragmented heart and knit the shattered pieces together, allowing them to grow as strong as the oak outside my window. Love that was now being planted into the heart of a new civilization. We had another chance to love each other. To look past the outside and into the hearts. Could we eliminate white-knuckled boys scared of the world?

Could we base this new world on the love that was ready to be shared like the magic the magic the garden?