You Can Never Go Home Again

Back when I was a young child living on the fault line in Northridge, California in the 1970's, my father decided to take part of our large, one-quarter acre yard and turn it into a vegetable and flower garden. This was around 1977, and I was around six years of age, so I was delighted with this, much more than my older two siblings. Coming from an extremely dysfunctional home, my parents marriage had deteriorated horribly, there were fights every night and my now biological mother as I now refer to her, played favorites with my older two siblings. She often pitted them against me, would play favorites with them, and I would often bear the brunt of her frustration, cruelty and wrath. I would often toadie after my father when he was in a good mood, which was not often, given he could be very moody. That meant I was left to my own devices at an early age and was quite lonely, so having a new garden was something for me to take my mind off things.

My father got to work in the late winter of 1977 digging up part of the yard and putting in the cinderblocks for a large plot for a vegetable garden, then two areas for flower gardens, and there were fruit trees surrounding it-fig, plum, tangerine, nectarine, lime, peach, grapefruit, pear, and apple. One the other side of the yard were apricot, lemon, tangelo, plus plenty of orange trees as the area had once been an orange grove going back to the late teens/early 1920's. We had a pool area as well that my father landscaped as well, he had always been very handy, and had put in a barbecue area with a gas line. So, with big excitement, we went to the hardware/garden center and bought soil mix, peat moss, and steer manure to amend to the clay/alluvial soil which was quite heavy and you could literally mold stuff out of(same stuff that built the adobe bricks of the San Fernando Mission). I helped my dad throw this stuff onto the turned over soil, laughing at how smelly the steer manure was, then he turned it into the soil and said now to let it aerate for twenty-four hours and if we are lucky, maybe we can get some rain, too.

I watched my father build furrows in the soil and then he showed me how and I helped him build them, I was the only one who helped. My siblings and my biological mother showed no interest in getting dirty, but I loved it. The time came to go back to the garden center, and we picked out vegetable seeds as well as starter packs of other vegetables such as beefsteak and cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, Japanese Eggplants, zucchini, cucumbers. For the seeds, they were having a sale, Dad scoured the papers so that was a good thing-we bought corn, turnips, beets, radishes(they always come up first), okra, lettuce, spinach, string beans, carrots, green onions. Flower seeds were cheap and we had fun buying a variety of them, including wildflower packs, zinnias, carnations, sweet peas, California poppies, and marigolds. Dad said to plant some marigolds around the veggies because pests hate them including snails and slugs, they hate the smell of them. So the planting began and we all had fun planting the seeds and the starter veggies.

Not long after seeds began to germinate and the flower and vegetable garden began to grow and proliferate. Spring turned to summer and soon we were getting blooms in our flower garden and harvesting some vegetables too. I would go out and water the garden, watch for pests, pick flowers and vegetables, sometimes my biological mother would come out and see how I was doing. She seldom paid attention to me, so it was nice when she did and was not yelling or criticizing me, and she was like, "Oh I like these mari-golls". I used to laugh at the way she would pronounce them, and I would be like, "It's not mari-golls, it's mari-GOLDS". She would just raise her eyebrow and ignore me, and just keep pronouncing it like that. Funny, smelly marigolds, in shades of orange, yellow, even white, or striped red and orange, sometimes like big pompoms, or singular, I always recognized the seeds because they looked like a little black twig with a white tuft at the end. You could harvest the seeds when the flower head dried, bees loved them, so did butterflies and moths, hummingbirds came over to the flower garden too, but garden pests left them alone. I used to like to occasionally pick a little bouquet and add roses from our rose garden to it. When my parents were fighting or my siblings were tormenting, I could just escape out to the garden and hide there among the vegetables, flowers and fruit trees, that was my refuge from the family drama and hell.

So for a few years, we had our vegetable and flower garden plot, till my parents divorced and my father was no longer there to help tend it. The joy and life was out of everything, and I was now in junior high, and he was not there to protect me from the daily torment from my biological mother as well as sister. The garden became abandoned and overgrown, a sad testament to once was....I tried to garden in it, but it became so overgrown with crabgrass and devilgrass that I myself could not garden in it. My father now remarried to a cruel and abusive woman I personally renamed "Stepmonster" who refused to let me spend time with him except for my birthday and holidays, and it was not like he lived long distance. It was a sad time, I felt as neglected and abandoned as that garden....once I turned eighteen the house went up for sale, and my father bought it from my mother in a short sale. I thought, okay, fine, I can continue to live here with my dad, but I was sadly mistaken.

When I was nineteen, under demands from his wife, I was kicked out of the only home I ever knew, into the streets of Los Angeles, and was told to never come back, and that I was not welcome to stay in my own home ever again. It was one of the most heartbreaking things ever and to make matters worse, the "Stepmonster" let both the front and backyards die off and look so horrible and embarrassing, it was as if she wanted no traces of the people that ever lived there before, including me. They still look horrible to this day, and I cannot ever go back home....my father is gone now too. All I have now are the memories of the joys of the gardens we once had, including the "mari-golls" in the flower garden, with their big pom-poms and sunset colors. They remind me of the California sunsets of my childhood, going down on my youth, and on the fact I can never go home again.