Chapter 6

Editors note: My friend the Unreliable narrator’s comment made me realize that pushing God around in a wheelbarrow is really no place to end the story so I thought I would take a stab at a conclusion, though it is really nothing like the conclusion I had originally intended.

The walk home was long. Arduous might have been a better word. Every step left me feeling more like Sisyphus rolling the great boulder up the mountainside. My palms, aching and wet with sweat, I imagined my palms like his: torn and blistered and bloody.

The hard physical labor of the day and emotional burden of my loss taunted me and made my every step more grueling. I thought about the great loves of my life and how they had all been torn from me. My first love, an innocent girl of sixteen who gave me her virginity and promised to love me forever, looked at me though the veil of time and wept maddening tears of sorrow. My second love, a green convertible I bought the summer after my freshman year in college. I saved all year long to buy the car and drove it for three more years before it broke down and I could no longer afford to fix it.

Objects. Material things. Lesser men might have sneered at my list of loves and called me vain, but I knew better. I knew that I have loved these things unselfishly and would have given myself wholly over to them if they had but asked. But none of these, not one, could compare to my compost, my black alchemists gold that had been purified by the sweat of brow and the ache in my back. So glorious was this potent mixture that seeds nearly sprung to life in its presence. That if I were to carelessly let fall even the slightest scoopful onto the ground below the whole of creation would burst forth from that small space of earth and dung and give life where none existed before.

Some have questioned my love of gardening. Commenting on the inordinate amount of time I spent outside on my hands and knees, my face level with the dirt. Was all that work necessary? Why did I keep coming back day in and day out when a twice weekly visit would have been sufficient? Couldn’t I have read or wrote or worked harder at my relationships, my job my faith?

I was so absorbed in these thoughts that I failed to notice the gathering clouds. My mind raced along unperturbed as the gentle breeze picked up around me and blew leaves and discarded wrappers along the pathways and gutters. Till all at once I came to my senses and realized that it had started raining.

I picked up my pace and hurried down the trail, the sky grew ever darker and more foreboding. The same thing had happened only the day before. I stood out in my front lawn pulling weeds and planting snapdragons and azaleas. When I realized that I had been over taken by a storm. That had certainly been a surprise.

A clap of thunder seemed to shake the earth itself. My mind was again racing.. This time with a new train of thought. Had I put my tools away? I couldn’t remember. Where there should have been the crystal clear memory of my activities, scurrying around gathering hoes and rakes I could summon no images. I was as a man struck blind in the road with only my doubts and insecurities to guide me.

I was approaching the neighborhood park when I had spent the morning. My home was close now. I quickened my pace, rounding the corner to my home I pushed Azazias into a clump of bushes at the foot of my drive, then dashing past the garage I ran along the cobblestone path at the side of my house, under a low trellis and along the river stone trail that led into my front yard.

Windblown debris was scattered about lawn. The sky was black and angry casting long shadows about me. I zigzagged along the mounds of flowers and vines passing the mailbox and the front gate to the far corner of the yard. There, beneath a lone cypress tree was my green wheelbarrow. The wind blown it over and the rain had washed the contents clear of the container. My black alchemists gold, my compost had wept along the long streams made by the gutter spouts and flowed down along the very foundations of my home.

Stunned I sank to my knees. The possibility that my compost was stolen was very real to me, and I had of course imagined in dark moments that it might be lost to me forever. But never in my wildest imagination had I thought that I might be the culprit of my own undoing; that my own actions had some how lead to my demise.

In that moment the rain began to fall hard luring the scene in front of me. My mind was a blank slate. As I stared at the scene before me I found myself contemplating my reaction? Was I supposed to cry? To scream in anguish? Where was my despair? Where was my unbridled rage? As I sat there examining the austerity of my feelings, something caught the corner of my eye. I blinked, the way you would if you had just seen something unimaginable. I stared again, this time with eyes bent on seeing.

The rain was like a great velvety curtain that cast a silvery luster to the world. The feeling of being washed clean by the force of nature would have excited me in my youth and in all likelihood I would have eventually masturbated to the memory of it. But what was before me outweighed any of that. I reached down as if to pinch myself but instead only steadied myself against the ground as I erupted in peals of unbroken laughter. Was my house… growing?