In the Garden - Melody Cryns

Sunflower seeds are planted in our garden and we are excited because we’ve all got our own designated spot of land in the garden which stretches out behind the flat we live at on Second Avenue. The back yards are like a whole alternate universe from the front of the house – separated by wooden fences which we’d climb, some fences taller than others – a complex world of rectangle and square plots of land – some of the land all grass, some filled with flowers, some overrun by nasturtiums and weeds. Above all the backyards behind our flat are the clothes lines. It seems that there are dozens and dozens of clothes lines. They’re not just your normal every day clothes lines either – they’re the ones where the ropes run through this round metal crank that the moms would use to move the rope and allow them to put more clothes on the lines from way high up without having to reach. We had one going from our dining room window and even the people upstairs had them. I remember when I was a young kid, a lot of the moms used those clothes lines to hang their clothes – and they’d even shout out to each other from across the yards through the windows as they were hanging their clothes, moving the round wheel thing that allowed them to keep the clothes line moving. All these clothes, towels and sheets would wave in the afternoon breeze above us as we played in the yard, usually climbing over fences when we weren’t supposed to.

Then it seemed less and less moms hung their clothes out to dry because they managed to get dryers and they didn’t need to do it, and besides, it doesn’t get hot in San Francisco and it’s damp so it’s hard for the clothes to dry on a line unless you time it just right.

Our garden was kind of a magical place because the couple who lived downstairs from us made it so – they lived in what was called the garden apartment because it was a small apartment that overlooked the garden – much, much smaller than our flat. Mr. and Mrs. Fentley lived there – and Mr. Fentley was a mad scientist who had a lab up near U.C. Hospital and was always doing experiments out in our back yard. Like one time he brought home a sheep skull and put it out in the yard to see what kind of fly larvae would grow on it and then he’d write about it on a clipboard. Mr. Fentley would show us all the different bugs on the bushes that we didn’t even know existed, like the “spittle bug” that would literally live inside what looked like his own spit so that nobody would bother him – and all these different types of beetles that lived on the plants as well. He didn’t like snails though because they ate all the flowers and leaves, so he’d pay us a nickel for every snail we’d find and smash against this one side of the fence.

Then for a while we had two white rabbits living in our back yard as well. We kids named them Herman and Big Mama even though later we found out they were both male rabbits. Those rabbits ate anything and everything that was green in our backyard leaving a sort of barren wasteland…so finally the rabbits had to go away. Mr. Fentley said they went to a farm someplace, and we all liked to believe that was true. Mr. Fentley got me my first pet guinea pig and even built a cage for him. He rang the doorbell on my birthday and when I answered, only the guinea pig in the cage remained – I never forgot that. I loved Timmy and found out later that Mr. Fentley had all kinds of mice and guinea pigs, etc., at his lab. Supposedly they were on vacation there.

So after the bunnies left, the yard began to turn green again. My brother brought home three nasturtium plant seeds – those green plants with the round green leaves and the orange flowers that spread like wildfire all over parts of Golden Gate Park and Sigmund Stern Grove. Those three little leaves spread through about a quarter of the back yard, but it was good because we could pick the orange flowers that grew endlessly in the yard now. There were fuchsia bushes and sometimes we’d pop the buds because we liked the popping noise, and that bush that had those huge flowers that we found out later were called chrysanthemums.

So, Mr. Fentley decided to give each of us a plot of land – me, my brother and sister and David and Barry around the corner. We marked off our land and even put name tags on it. Then he gave us sun flower seeds to plant – imagine that, sun flower seeds.

So we all planted our seeds, and every day we’d run into the garden and see if our seeds had grown, and soon enough we saw the green shoots pop out of the ground – we were so excited! Those green shoots grew into huge stalks that were taller than us – and huge yellow sun flowers with sun flower seeds galore in the middle – the guinea pig loved the seeds.