Mara's Garden

The year Mara got her first plot in the community garden, she pressed her bare wrist into the soil the way her grandmother had taught her and flinched. “When it bites,” her grandmother used to say, “it’s still winter pretending.”

Mara ignored the bite. She had spent months in a new city that didn’t know her name, and the earth was the only thing that would take what she had to give. She tucked tomato and basil babies into cold April dirt and strung twine between stakes like a harp.

“Bold,” called a voice over the fence.

He stood with a sack of compost on his shoulder, hair in his eyes, a watch on his wrist that had stopped at noon. He tilted his chin at the tomatoes. “You’ve declared war on frost.”

“You sound like my grandmother,” Mara said, half smiling.

“Then you’ve got a good grandmother,” he said, hoisting the compost into his plot. “I’m Ben.”

They traded a few cheerful, neighborly facts. He was leaving the next day for a job in Portland. Mara had just finished a fellowship that paid in prestige and coffee. He offered her a handful of worm-rich compost in exchange for the sight of someone not afraid to plant early. She laughed and took it with both hands.

That night, a thin white film tucked itself around the garden. In the morning, Mara’s plants were black at the edges, their leaves crumpled like burned paper. She knelt in the alley to gather their small, stiff bodies. Ben’s plot was empty, the soil fine and turned, patient. He had left a note tucked under a stone: “Don’t give up. See you in another season.”

The city warmed around her slowly after that. Mara learned the names of the gardeners and the alley cats and the exact time the light changed on the brick wall. She busied her hands with whatever would grow. In July, she harvested herbs and grief in equal measure. The bites of all her choices softened.

The second spring, she waited until May. She pressed her wrist into the soil again, held it there, and did not flinch. Only then did she plant.

“It’s about time,” said Ben. He was back, leaner in the face, his watch still stopped. He watered with care that bordered on reverence, as if the hose were an instrument he had practiced for years.

“You left,” she said.

“I did,” he said. “It wasn’t what I thought. My dad’s not well. I’m here for a while.”

He had a partner now, he said. They lived down the block from a bakery that made croissants so flaky you needed forgiveness. Mara was seeing someone who painted murals on the undersides of overpasses. Ben admired her trellis and offered her a seedling he had started on his windowsill. “Sungold,” he said. “Sweet as candy.”

They spent a morning talking mulch and weather patterns and where the crows slept. When the hose kinked and shot water at them like a prank, they laughed and held their hands up and let themselves be cooled. In August, Mara ate a Sungold like a prayer and thought of Ben’s careful hands, but when she saw him in the group text for the garden workday, he had written he’d be out of town, back soon, hope everyone stayed well.

The third spring, his father died. Mara found out because the old men who kept the key to the tool shed murmured it to each other. She wrote a note and tucked it under a rock in his plot: “I have extra basil if you want some.” He wrote back weeks later on the back of an old seed packet: “Thanks. Holding off this year. Everything feels like dirt.”

That was the year Mara’s mural painter left town in pursuit of a wall so long he said painting it would be like walking across a country. She learned to fix the hose herself. She learned there were things you could not hurry even by standing over them with your heart in your hands. She made an ugly scarecrow out of an old shirt and a broken rake and was unreasonably proud when the sparrows hated it.

Summer was a pale blue bowl tipped line by line into gold. The garden became a place where neighbors left jars and lemons and apologies. Mara brought home armfuls of green and let them turn her kitchen into something alive. When she saw Ben on the sidewalk in October, he had stubble and a bruise-yellow sadness. They exchanged quick, public words—how’s your mother, did the raccoons get you this year, I keep meaning to try that bakery—and then the bus came between them and then the winter did.

On the first truly warm day of the fourth spring, Mara woke at six and opened her windows to the sound of pigeons scolding the sun. She ate toast over the sink and put her grandmother’s ball of twine and a packet of seed into her bag. When she pressed her wrist into the plot, the earth welcomed her. No bite.

Ben knelt two beds over, sleeves rolled, a smear of dirt on his cheek. The stopped watch had disappeared. In its place was a plain, working one, ticking soft as a moth.

“Hey, neighbor,” he said.

“Hey,” she said. Her voice surprised her by how calm it sounded.

They worked side by side with the easy silence of people who have run out of small talk long ago and found they don’t need it. He talked about a job that wasn’t glamorous but let him leave at five. She told him about the new grant that would mean she didn’t have to cobble three gigs into something like safety. They traded gripes about squirrels and recipes for collards. “Do you ever feel,” he said, knotting the twine around a stake, “that life has a way of telling you when to be patient?”

Mara thought of cold April tomatoes and notes under stones and years spent learning the shape of her own hunger. “I do now,” she said.

He smiled like someone who’d been underwater and just found the ladder back to air. “I can finally keep plants alive,” he confessed. “I used to think it was about having the right pot. It’s the light. It’s the arc of the day.”

They tied up their tomatoes together, hands brushing and not jumping away. A bee landed on Ben’s sleeve and took a slow tour of his skin as if it had a right. A girl in a denim jacket, all knees and elbows, raced past with a watering can and shouted that her peas had made it. The air smelled like compost and something sugary, like forgiveness.

When the first fruit turned, it was a single blush on the underside of a Cherokee Purple. Mara pressed the soft weight of it into her palm and thought of all the seeds she had put in the ground and not seen again. The sun had warmed it through. “Here,” she said, handing it to Ben.

“Share,” he insisted, and they tore it with their thumbs, juice slicking their hands. It tasted like late August in July, like something had finally added up. He licked his wrist where a rivulet ran and laughed. “Your grandmother would say the soil doesn’t bite anymore.”

“She would,” Mara said. They fell into a comfortable quiet. A robin scolded a cat from the fence. Someone’s radio floated the good part of a song across the street. Time, which had once been a wall, lay down like a road.

Mara thought, not for the first time, that the person herself had never been out of reach. It was herself she had to grow into, and the season, and the light. It wasn’t about opening the gate to the right plot. It was about walking through it on the morning when your wrist could rest in the earth and feel only warmth, only welcome.

When they left the garden, they did it slowly, as if a new choreography had been taught to their feet. Ben held the gate for her and she caught it with her own hand, a small, shared weight. At the corner, he asked if she wanted to try that bakery at last, see if the croissants were as flaky as rumor.

“Bold,” she teased.

“It’s about time,” he said, and this time the words felt less like an old joke and more like a door that had finally learned how to open.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

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