Writing Exercise – Gardens and Treasure

Exercise – Imagine your childhood home, the sights and sounds. Tell a story of something that happened there.

When I was a child, gardening meant getting a flat of flowers from the housing complex office. We'd get up early one Saturday morning and walk to the main garage, eager to beat out the other residents for the best plants. My sister and I would run back and forth across the garage as we picked our favorite colors and brought them over to deposit in the plastic tray our mother carried. The flats held 36 flowers, six packs of six flowers and if you were very lucky and had come very early in the morning you would find enough healthy packs that your whole flat would be full of blooms. When we had filled our flat, our mother would look over our choices and make a few suggestions, prompting us to pick a different plant, or exchange one for a brighter bloom. She never took over completely, letting us both feel like we had our own flowers coming home with us.

Planting the flowers wasn't as fun a task and I was much more eager to help my neighbor with her outdoor projects. Instead of a garden full of blooms she had two evergreen shrubs that sat like large square blocks in front of her townhouse. She would trim them occasionally with great metal shears, the heavy swishklunk sound ringing into the air. I was always too little to hold the shears, so I was often put to work on leveling the bricks. Her little fence in front of the bushes were leftover red bricks that matched our townhomes, tilted 45 degrees and pressed deep into the dirt. During the year some of the bricks would break or fall over so every spring she needed them straightened and I loved the job. The top of the bricks were warm and worn with sunshine, all dirt washed and dull corners. The change when you pulled them from the ground was like magic, the brighter red and the sharper corners shining out from under a layer of black dirt. My brother was good at stomping the bricks back into place but I loved to dig them up and then rebury them. Part of it was because it was a job that I wasn't too little to handle, a job that I did well and received praise. But a huge part was because of the treasure.

One year I found a nickel buried deep into the ground. To me it was worth so much more than 5 cents; it represented an entire concept - buried treasure. Suddenly everything I found underground was exciting and worthy of stuffing into my pockets and taking to school. A scrap of metal was a policeman's badge and a piece of smooth stone was an Indian arrowhead. A button surely came from an early pioneer and the petrified wood was around during the time of the dinosaurs. I was excited to show my treasures to my friends on the way to school in the morning. We would lean against the fence on the way past the football field and I would cup my hands around my latest find and tell the tale of how it came to be buried under the earth. There was always a tragic death or mysterious disappearance and then years of waiting until a young hero would come by and free the object from its prison of dirt and bugs. Then I would lean in close and slowly uncup my hands, letting everyone see what new thing had been uncovered. To see what new treasure had been discovered.