I watched how they tended it; how the hose sprinkled softly, how the canvas gloves patted soil, how the friction occurred between rake, leaves, and grass. I imagined the ceramic ducklings that trailed behind their mother, the miniature frogs you could hear but could not see. Grab the broom, the dust pan, clear the bricks of fallen foliage. 

This must’ve been The Secret Garden. The one that Mary peeks through on the frail paper cover. Here, the heat was so blistering I couldn’t help but surrender to it. In the garden of green, the falling pods of seeds from the wisteria weaved around the pergola, the provider of shade that was the Silver Oak my brother and I would climb, shelter from the sun. 

A tin box of dominoes would be taken out of the closet, and each tile would tap and fall on the glass table outside. Sliding quarters among three players, coins seemed to be the only material at stake—I refused the thought of leaving, departure distant like dreams. 

I had never cried over goodbyes. A particular day, I sat buckled in, waving out the window when inexplicable tears began. My grandmother held my small hand softly, promised I’d be back soon. There was no doubt of course, but I didn’t want to let go. I didn’t want to leave amid the pink evening and her tight embrace. 

~

Three pairs of eyes gazed over its death, resting and wings broken, sunbleached for what must’ve been hours. 

A dragonfly!

I remember how we crouched down to inspect it. How my grandmother went inside to grab a plastic zip-lock, said we could preserve it. A piece of paper and pen:

6/27/11

Joaquin + Maya found this dragonfly outside — ants were all over it, but we chased them away and we will keep the dragonfly to show friends of Maya + Joaquin.

She carefully used the paper to scoop it into the bag, pieces of wing cracking off and sliding in. She handed the bag to me, you keep this. It was meant to look back on, to be reread and remembered when I open the wooden box in my bedroom with cluttered memorabilia, some important, some not, and to see the pieces of insect scattered across the paper, a wing somewhat intact, but the blue ink still remaining. To look again and think there is beauty even in death, preservation eternal, a summer eternal.

~

I watched for hummingbirds to drink from the hanging feeder of nectar, and my grandmother walked out with a bowl of sliced watermelon. Shirt stained with juice, I waited patiently on the rocking chair, back and forth to the classical station on the radio. And the wind chimes rang like songs, ringing reverberated like my grandmother’s voice, gliding through air, a reminder of what is sweet. A reminder that this is your home.

The fence had been painted; an unfinished illusion of a gate that appeared as if it led to somewhere magical, beyond the neighbor’s yard. I thought of the portal it could be, the ones like in the children’s books I read. The ones where kids went on adventures and encountered strange creatures, roamed worlds of imagination as they indulged in innocence. 

There were yellow flowers painted on the other panels; I wanted to paint like my grandmother. Like the glowing ballerina in the night above my bed, like the one above my dresser. The brushes and acrylics I’d scope through, what she used to so carefully paint the canvases—why don’t you paint anymore? 

Only today she sent me a photo of a birthday card with a watercolored scene of the corner of the yard. The glorious tree greener, like when sunrays seeped through its branches and leaves, and I’d hear the squirrels and mourning doves in their repeating pitches. Planters of red flowers unknown, but their essence so familiar, almost reachable. 

~

In the day time I watched my grandfather push the wheelbarrow around, throwing piles of leaves which would fall to the bottom of the bin. Grass would be cleared, branches trimmed, weeds pulled in effort to maintain, nurture, create. A garden workday would end mid-afternoon, and the night would fall much later. It was only then you could no longer see beyond the glass reflection, and that the dim lighting inside seemed safer than out.

When we sat around the kitchen table, my grandfather spoke of the boogieman. The one who existed in distant beliefs, in stories told in playful caution. The big window looking out into the yard is where it must’ve existed, in shadows and in bushes. So I kept looking out into nothing, listening and watching, until I looked out once more and spotted the two little red lights which must’ve been his eyes. Suddenly, mine widened—there he is!

That’s right, said my grandfather, and I believed it somewhat, so I stared until he blinked first.

~

At age fifteen, a certain naivete was believed to be broken but barely even so. The lights were strung around the pergola, plenty of family there. It wasn’t supposed to be a quinceañera, but I suppose at the root of it, it was. At the root of it, I was at the age considered to be teenage maturity, the age of a certain level of conscientiousness, and at the age I thought was not yet old enough.

But I was only as young as I was when I’d run through sprinklers and wasn’t afraid to pick up snails. To worry over what was not yet real, to ride through adolescence without taking a look back. But there, among cousins and relatives, moving shadows of the past, I could see myself staring at small garden statues and imagining stories for them, collecting stones and fallen petals to keep and press in books. An ecosystem of shared blood and soil, stories told over and over again and their bursting reaction of laughter that never failed to occur, no matter how many times told. There was no world I could imagine a birthday without them all, to continue to grow without them all.

I sat next to my cousins at the table. Gabi said we’re nine years apart, yet the gap felt smaller. I talked to my younger cousins, their ambitions for themselves in a few years’ time, the purity in their high-pitched words; some of which remained in me, and I wasn’t yet ready to let go. 

I blew out the candles, felt the same, more or less. From the old stereo came out the backdrop of music among applause and “happy birthdays”; it all kept moving.

~

Remember when you used to tell us that your house was our second home?

Of course, this is your house. This is your home.

This is your home.