My first garden grew on the fire escape outside our apartment in the Bronx. Whatever was green usually grew between the cracks of the pavement. But every spring, my elementary school offered families a chance to buy seeds.
My mother ordered morning glories from the school catalogue. The seeds arrived in brown paper packets stapled to our original order. They were black and looked like small canoes. We soaked the seeds in a glass of water. After a day’s immersion, we’d plant them in a cheese box that I had procured in advance from Mr. Kurtz’ grocery store at the end of our street. Back then, American cheese arrived in a rectangular block and was sliced to order—thin, medium or thick—wrapped in wax paper, folded and sealed.
My mother sent me to request an empty cheese box. Mr. Kurtz always wore a white apron and stood close to his register near a display of Hostess Twinkies. He went to the back room of the store and returned with a box about nine inches long. I carried my treasure upstairs to where we filled it with dirt. I don’t remember where we got the soil–either from the Five and Dime, or dug some up in the vacant lot that adjoined our house. That’s when the real work began.
We prepared a garden bed for our morning glories by making an indentation with the back of a soup spoon for seeds that were swollen and cracked after soaking, pressed them into a prepared row and covered them up, placing the box in the sunshine outside the kitchen window on the fire escape. We could do no more—had to trust to sun and water and time.
Each day I got up, walked past my two sisters who shared a separate bed, and tip-toed to the kitchen where I would immediately stick my head outside the window and check on the progress of the seeds. The fire escape served as a summer patio and as a runway for sparrows who chirped on and off its metal slats. One morning I looked outside and saw the soil beginning to erupt. Even though I knew better, used my finger to disrupt the soil so I could see an individual seed sprout, head bent over like a crooked woman still encased in its seed hat, until it emerged from the soil, growing long and spindly, magically seeking a white string we had saved from a bakery box and thumb-tacked to the window frame.
Each day I’d investigate how much the morning glories had grown. From seeds to seedlings, I watched them wrap and braid themselves along the string. But we had to select the healthiest, could only grow one or two, which made me sad. As summer approached, I watched blossoms appear, tightly pressed together like two palms, before they opened into blossoms bluer than Paul Newsman’s eyes, bluer than the sky, framing my window, my first garden.