![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
To be honest, I didn’t have that much faith in my mom when she first shared her vision for the front yard. Lawns waste a lot of water, plus the California drought didn’t help, so she had it all ripped out and laid bare. The soil wasteland was soon christened with a sparse jasmine plant (her favorite), a fake stone path (my favorite), and new fence.
It wasn’t until I left home for college that I noticed how much the garden had crystallized into my mother’s vision. Quickly, the sprawling daises bled onto the driveway, the Birds of Paradise were towering skyscrapers in the mini green city, and ice plants and succulents covered every square inch until there was no brown left to see.
My mom is notorious for exclaiming she doesn’t have a green thumb, but her front yard garden is more than evidence against that; I think it shows what it means to caretake, to love unconditionally, to create community in ways unseen. It is in this way that our narratives are intertwined, interlocked like the jewelry chain that adorns my hairclips, repeated like the mistakes I make that my mother too once made, and fused like the roots of my mother’s jasmine that now blooms in bursts along the wooden fence.
It wasn’t until I left home for college that I noticed how much the garden had crystallized into my mother’s vision. Quickly, the sprawling daises bled onto the driveway, the Birds of Paradise were towering skyscrapers in the mini green city, and ice plants and succulents covered every square inch until there was no brown left to see.
My mom is notorious for exclaiming she doesn’t have a green thumb, but her front yard garden is more than evidence against that; I think it shows what it means to caretake, to love unconditionally, to create community in ways unseen. It is in this way that our narratives are intertwined, interlocked like the jewelry chain that adorns my hairclips, repeated like the mistakes I make that my mother too once made, and fused like the roots of my mother’s jasmine that now blooms in bursts along the wooden fence.
