Flower Patch of Dreams
Interactive, Part 2
If I hadn’t looked over there, I would never have seen him. He stood dragging his rake through the dried brown and less dry yellow leaves – not a rake with a hard, straight metal edge, but with the bendy wooden tines, more like a spread out broom head than a rake. It almost worked like a broom, too. It swept the leaves into a pile without digging into the grass and plowing up the dirt underneath.
One more step and he was out of sight, so I got up from the wood bench (brown paint, basically in good shape, but some of it was damp and peeling in places) and took a few steps to keep him in sight. A pack of boys, of wildly varying heights, as twelve-year old boys tend to be, danced and kicked and threw a ball past me, but I still kept the young man in sight.
“Elmer!” I heard, and he finished the latest section of his line of leaf piles, and looked up.
“Here!” he answered. He turned in the direction of the voice, so I could see his face. Tan face, creased squint lines around the brown eyes, brown hair messy but not matted. He probably combed his coarse hair every morning whether he needed to or not.
A young girl in a pinafore brought him a plastic grocery bag. “Thanks, Gin girl,” he said, and sat on the ground while she continued past him, calmly heading to her next destination.
He sat cross-legged and reached into the bag. “Want some?” he asked me. I startled.
Somehow, I had moved until I was close enough for him to see me. He chuckled, a low sound that seemed out of place with his thin frame.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was staring, wasn’t I?”
He tilted his head. “Like what you see?” He raised his eyebrows. But his look and his tone didn’t seem to match the suggestive nature of his words.
“You’re doing a good job,” I answered. “Your line of piles is straight and even.” He reached into his sack and pulled out a sandwich. How old was he? Twenties? Thirties?
His face showed a slight frown. “You aint a supervisor type, are you?” His tone had gone from easy-going friendly to suspicious.
“No,” I answered. “I just like to watch people at the park here. I’m supposed to get out and get some fresh air. Mostly, I sit at that bench over there.” I motioned in the direction I’d come from.
He nodded, and his friendly manner returned. “Behind the flower patch of dreams,” he said, looking up at me. “The lover’s bench.” He took a bite of his sandwich. Was that really just peanut butter and jam?
“You hungry?” he asked, after he swallowed, and I just kept standing there, watching. “I just got the one sandwich, but there’s chips.”
I shook my head. “Sorry,” I said. “My mind wanders. No, thanks. I should leave you be.”
“No need,” he said. “Don’t mind company.”
There must have been a strange look on my face, because his changed. “You okay?” he asked.
“I’m not company,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you can still sit down here. Or stand. It’s a free country.”
I came back to myself. “Flower patch of dreams?” I asked. “Where?”
“Behind the lover’s bench. Ironweed. Goldenrod. Asters. I don’t mow between that and the fence, so the weeds grow up.”
I walked back to the bench to look. Purple flowers, tails full of yellow florets, delicate skinny white starbursts around a yellow center. He had called it a flower patch but he had also called the flowers there weeds. Well, they were weeds, so I should be able to pick them. I arranged a bunch of them in my hand, and headed back to where he was sitting on the ground next to his rake, eating.
“Here,” I said, handing them to him. “Will these put you to sleep?”
There was the frown again. So I’d done something wrong again. But his face smoothed, and once again he changed to friendly. “Because I called it a dream patch? You have trouble sleeping?”
“Not at all,” I answered. “The opposite. Waking up. I was afraid the flower patch was making my mind wander more than usual. And you’re wrong about the bench. It’s the Ada Lovelace Bench.”
“Aye,” he said. “But that’s such a sad name. ‘Loveless.’ No one should be without love.”
“Are you without love?” I asked, curious.
Not a frown this time, but the look definitely meant that was the wrong thing to say. But he smoothed it away so quickly I barely had time to register it.
“My wife’s in the grave,” he said, “but I still have my Gin girl.”
“Did you put her there?”
He did something funny with his eyes, and with the line of his mouth. “In a manner of speaking,” he answered. “You could say so. She died in childbirth.”
“With your daughter?” I asked. “Gin girl?”
“No,” he answered. “My boy. Walter. He passed, too. I had naught for him but cow’s milk after Trudy passed. And the closest neighbor that far away.”
I nodded. He nodded back and finished his lunch. I stood there and watched.
“Time to get back to work, ma’am,” he told the young woman with the wandering mind. He stuffed the plastic bag in a pocket on his overalls, set the flowers carefully under the nearest tree, and picked the rake back up.
“Your line of piles is straight and even,” she told him. How old was she? Twenties? Thirties?
He leaned on his hands holding the handle of the rake upright, looking after the young woman who had brought him the flowers. Then he sighed, and began to rake again.
She sat down on the bench (brown paint, basically in good shape, but some of it was damp and peeling in places) and looked over at a man raking leaves, and the pretty flower arrangement under the tree next to him. Purple and yellow and white stars with yellow centers.
“What a nice young man,” she thought. “He must have a lady friend.”
Loved it, Ms. Mary. Sad and beautiful, and it leaves you wishing for better for the pair. 🙇♂️