They seemed entranced by
the garden, as if what was
happening were magic.
bright, crazy things were living,
And they had helped

By LORI HALL STEELE
      Matthew and Jessica were the first neighbor children I fell in love with. I had been hoping for quiet in that place, but there they were, crashing through the door with their Pocahantas songs and blue crayons, with their ceaseless needs for red Gatorade, to hear “Tikki Tikki Tembo,” to help plant the sunflowers.
      Which is the thing that drew them in the first place, the thing that seems to draw them all: planting. Or, more precisely, the sight of an adult apparently playing in dirt, blithely and unpenalized. Gardening transfixes the neighbor kids.
      The cosmos drew the twins. Matthew and Jessica were 4 then, beautiful dark-eyed children who finished one another’s sentences. The tow-headed brothers Ryan, a 4-year-old who head-butted furniture, and the serene Corey, 8, soon followed, arriving as I dug a hole for a blue hydrangea.
      Later, over years, the neighbor children vanished and multiplied: There was Brittany as I transplanted pink rambling roses, Kier while I dropped in tulip bulbs, the second Ryan as the mulberries ripened, the third Ryan while planting lavender in rows.
      But the twins came first, followed by the blond brothers, and it’s that forever-young foursome I wonder about the most, the ones who helped me plant my first garden and later kept it alive, tiny strangers with whom I briefly shared life’s grief and grace.
      They visited whenever I was outdoors, checking the height of their sunflowers, holding the water pitcher, making snapdragons snarl like monsters. They sat on the porch and rocked in the white chair, eating pieces of bananas in the sun.
      In time, they began telling other neighbor children to keep out of the flowers. Ryan once threw a spoon at a child who, he said, rode his bike too near the cosmos.
      They seemed entranced by the garden, as if what was happening were magic. Bright crazy things were living, and they had helped. Matthew was mesmerized by how the moss roses stained his little fingers red or pink “like paint” when he pulled off the dead petals. He brought other children by to see how a new flower had bloomed in its place.
      The next summer, after a car accident left my family grieving deeply, I rarely went outside. Matthew began leaving pictures on the door, a dozen variations of angular blue and green Crayola people with mammoth yellow-scribbled sunflowers peering over top.
      One June afternoon I heard rustling outside and pushed aside the blinds, and there was little Matthew, crouching beside the self-seeded flowers with a Dixie cup. He sang to himself as he poured water on a plant. He picked off a dead flower and laid it in the dirt. He turned and he looked at the closed front door, and he ran off.
      I found a green ceramic teapot, filled it with water and left it for him. A week later, he knocked on the door.
      “I need more water,” he said, holding the teapot out. Together, we went to refill the pot.
      The blond boys disappeared most of that summer, and their father eventually explained that things were grim. He had AIDS, and the children would be living elsewhere after he died, which would be soon.
      Corey, the youngest of the two, continued to run around as fast as he could and ask for food. Any food. But Ryan, the oldest boy, turned quiet. He sat on the porch in the white chair, rocking back and forth, back and forth, looking out toward the world.
      I sometimes wonder how their faces have changed, and whether Corey still asks for apples when he's not hungry, whether Ryan still stares quietly at the world with questions too big for any boy to carry. I wonder if Matthew still sings like a muse, whether Jessica still looks defiantly at the world, just daring it. For them, I am most likely forgotten, or, at most, a coalesced but vague memory, more like a feeling, something stripped of detail, a time of sunflowers and afternoon light, of rocking.
      But for me, their faces will always be tenderly suspended in time, the image of a little boy still caring for cosmos when I had forgotten that it mattered, the imprint of a little boy quieted by sorrow, rocking endlessly in summer's sun.

Published in Northern HOME.