Cabbage is a form of communication

My Hometown Poem #108: One week in July

Photo: Suzanna de Baca

Our neighbor down the road 
has moved to assisted living, 
dementia worsening day by day. 
Another in the hospital, foot 
blackened, infection threatening 
to spread poison through her leg 
and up into her heart, another gone 
so soon after his wife of seventy 
years passed. A steady stream 
of traffic weaves in and out 
of the cemetery on Highway 69. 
But it is July and the heat rises 
like steam from a boiling kettle, 
and the garden keeps growing.

In the office, we jumble breaking 
news and tragedy in a hodgepodge 
of passing conversation. Wars raging, 
earthquakes rumbling, a tunnel 
filing up with water, people drowning 
like rats in their cars. Over lunch, 
we chat about haze from the wildfires, 
rights usurped and enjoined, record 
heat so scorching one news station 
proclaims: “It’s like living in hell.”
But it is July, and the garden 
keeps growing.

“I have a cabbage if you need one,” 
says yet another neighbor, 
a septuagenarian with curly white hair, 
who resembles a bantamweight boxer 
with an elfin grin, whose wife hangs 
on the precipice between life and death
in a nearby hospital. I drive down 
the gravel road and take him dinner, 
a tupperware of chicken wings 
and french fries, because he won’t eat 
anything fancy. Standing in the driveway, 
we both cry just the tiniest bit, unusual 
for us, but still he insists on taking me 
to the garden to harvest the cabbage, 
a huge round orb, the palest shade 
of green, alabaster mixed with laurel, 
a creamy basketball with leaves 
wrapping around it like hands in prayer. 

“I don’t even like cabbage,” he confesses.
“I just like having a garden.” He loads 
me up, cabbage and zucchini spilling 
out of my arms, everything smelling 
so musky and alive. 

“Come back tomorrow for beans,” 
he says.  After all, it’s July, 
and the garden keeps growing.

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