It was one of those afternoons
we would lay in the hall on that ocean blue carpet for hours. The swamp cooler just wasn’t cool
enough. After too many games of
Uno, we decided to brave the elements and take a trip to the local convenience
store. Our hopes rested in being
able to devour our ice cream cones before the sun stole them.
Silently traipsing up a hill we
took a miserable break that wasn’t much of a break at all but rather a
realization of how much water we were losing by the second. I was surprised to
look to my right and see a middle-aged woman gardening, believing at once she
was a little too enthusiastically dedicated to the state of her plants. “No one in their right mind should be
gardening in this heat,” I muttered to myself. But alas, she
was there in her gardening knee pads and sun hat, happily pouring drop after
drop of water onto each plant from her lime green watering can. A can like I’d remembered from reading
Peter Rabbit. The kind he hid
behind when he was trying to escape from Mr. McGregor.
From where we were standing, the garden was flawless: rich
brown dirt, zero weeds, perfectly green plants with beautifully bloomed flowers
in every color imaginable, all in ideally straight lines. Thoughts of how much work she must
spend flooded my mind, followed shortly after with thoughts about how much I
hated weeding.
Then, at the end of one row of
petunias something grabbed my attention.
A large plant lay uprooted and turned on its side, but still in its
flawless form. It was supported
with the tip of a stiff leaf. The
plant did not touch the ground anywhere but this tip and the very bottom of the
root. Odd. We casually inched closer to take a
better look. Plastic plant.
It was a plastic plant.
I muffled my laughter so the gardener extraordinaire wouldn’t hear. My eyes darted down each row. It couldn’t be, no, but it is! A whole garden of plastic plants! My friend didn’t even notice what was
going on, too caught up in the heat of the day to care about an old lady’s
garden. So I smile to myself,
chuckle a little bit, and continue my way to the convenience store.
Don’t worry, lady, your secret
is safe with me. . .
