PATCHWORK

The morning train to the big city rolls slowly in and out of little stations, past all the post-village, pre-city patchwork gardens fitted into every little cul-de-sac between tracks and fences, walls, houses, rivers and roads along the way, many of the little plots apparently held by squatter’s rights - no one lives on them - a long crazy quilt of no-man's land gardens the random shape and size of large carpet scraps, on which at this time of year are growing every temperate vegetable you can think of and every one a work of love, for are all are lush with care (there are no monkeys or deer down here).

But this early in the morning it's often hard to spot the creators of these fine vegetable arts, since theirs are away-from-home plots on which they work when they can and all are special extracurricular activities, but now and then I spot, usually dressed in vegetable colors and almost one with the vegetables, a gardener working or seated as unobtrusively as cabbage amidst the green and brown of their personal ongoing opus, it's usually an elder in straw hat and old gardening clothes taking a breather in the shade of tomato plants or carefully turning an edge of the plot into another neat brown row along which to arrange orderly processions of green, this amidst the rice paddies or edging the streets of the pre-city too as the train draws through the outskirts into the full-blown urb, where realty and reality get expensive and there is no room even for carpet scraps...