Danusha V. Goska

The Old Gardener

This is Danusha Goska.

There are prize winning rock stars and scholars among us in Bloomington, but in our day-to-day lives, celebrities may have little impact. As a working class grad student, I take inspiration from unsung heroes. I walk to campus along a railroad, a harsh terrain exposed to bitter wind in winter, and searing summer sun. One day I saw a man, in suspenders and a straw hat, tending a garden in this almost Martian landscape, even as an eighty-car coal train thundered past. "What a beautiful garden you have!" I shouted. "What a beautiful body you have!" he replied. A harmless witticism, but from a grandfatherly Hoosier, it rendered me timid. I never spoke to him again. But, year after year, as I trudged to campus, convinced that my department would stop only at hiring a hitman to get rid of me, I drew inspiration from his garden. In spite of poor and peaked soil only a tad more frangible than concrete, no water source, and foraging rabbits and deer, his onion greens speared through every first thaw; spring sprang enchanting floral displays; plump ruby tomatoes punctuated summer; harvest chaff battened his well-tended compost pile. Until this spring. No one has harvested this year's onions, growing neatly, all in their rows. No hands have tamed bolting cauliflower, or yanked invading waves of weeds and tares threatening to swallow garden design. The old man, my inspiration, has apparently moved on to greener pastures, and I am stunned by the sadness I feel at his absence, a sadness that alerts me to how profoundly one lone, anonymous gardener's flint and creativity have illuminated my path.

For Speak Your Mind, this has been Danusha Goska.

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