There’s a strip of gardens behind our house. Renting the third floor apartment means we don’t strictly have access to ours, though I’m sure we will be invited to invade from time to time by P and P who live downstairs. In the mornings the gardens fill with a mix of birdsongs that come through our window and call us out of sleep. But the gardens are surrounded by construction work. Every spare inch of Astoria, every foreclosed home, is soon colonized by a new identikit apartment block stretching as tall as permitted or a little bit taller and confronting the world with rows upon row of square eyes. So this morning, like many recent mornings, the birdsong was drowned at regular intervals by the growling of drills and thump of hammers. Tweet, tweet, peacefulness, grrrrrrr. Tweet, tweet chirrup. Grrrrrrrrr. Bang bang. Etc.
An elderly Italian man plants things in the garden. He’s not “a gardener” as such. Several years ago when P’s Dad, who owns the house, was living here, the man appeared on the doorstep and somehow they reached an agreement – despite P’s Greek Dad not speaking Italian and the man not speaking any Greek or English – that he could come and plant things, use part of the produce himself and leave the rest for the occupants of the house. He disappears in Winter but reappears most Summers to put in vegetables and tend to the fig tree. No-one who currently lives here knows his name - I’m looking forward to getting into the garden one day when he’s there to say hello.
It seems a dispute could be afoot though. P asked me the other day if I spoke Italian (I don’t), because of a potential misunderstanding with the garden man. P’s wife (also P) had planted some cucumbers, under little mounds. A few days later, she could swear the mounds had been meddled with. Sabotage? Then I had a dream. In it, I opened the blind in the morning to see a new fence dividing the garden length-wise in two, woman-P gardening on one side and garden-man on the other.
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