When the World was New (an excerpt from Ghosts in the Garden, a moment for Tessa)

I know that I've said it, but it bears multiple repeatings: An Aerial Armadillo is one of the most blessed blog spots on the virtual earth. Go there and be somewhere else—in Southern Africa, in Lantau, in a sacred before, above a plate of sushi. Go there and see beauty captured with utter verisimilitude, or with bold, painterly geometries. Go there. That's the thing. You won't want to come back.

Tessa, the force behind An Aerial Armadillo, has been reading a book I once wrote about marriage and El Salvador. I was honored this week when she mentioned Still Love in Strange Places alongside a mention of the reliably hysterical (humanly, craftily, and originally so) Anna Lefler.

Today is Earth Day, of course, a day that always has me remembering a long time ago, when the world was new to me. That's something I wrote about in Ghosts in the Garden, and so I excerpt that here.

We come to gardens bearing memories of gardens. I came to Chanticleer remembering a fringe of strawberries that pressed up against my childhood home. Whether we ever actually ate the strawberries that those tousled plants bore, I don’t remember. Whether my mother planted them there, or perhaps my father, I cannot say for sure. But I know I crouched the little girl’s crouch and peered, the way children peer, toward the fruit. I know I loved how the red would follow white, and how the white had come from green, and how the pendant of juice, with its thistle of seeds, would plump until it was too fat for its serrated cap. There is nothing exotic about a strawberry patch except that it delivers on its promise.

A strawberry fringe is a garden to a girl, just as the creek that runs between the old shade trees across the street is a child’s haven. I was the one who didn’t mind mud in her shoes, the child who named the tadpoles, then the frogs. I was an adventureress at the creek across the street, where it was cool and dark and also many shades of green (moss, algae, leaves). In a year I would move with my family to an isolated outpost in Alberta, Canada, where nothing anywhere was the lucky color of the Irish and I couldn’t find a seed, and I grew determined — always, forever — never to see that much comatose brown again. Three months later we would be home again, in the house with the strawberry fringe. My toes in the creek. My hands on the frogs. My dreams of fruit and flowers.

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