by judyatlarge

Created on: June 01, 2008   Last Updated: June 10, 2008

My baby brother was 13 days old on my fifth birthday. Dejected, listening to grandmas and aunts make a fuss over the baby, I sat on the porch. Daddy came and sat beside me. "What's up, kid?"

"Don't like that baby. He's all wrinkled and ugly and doesn't do anything but cry."

"Yup, he sure is wrinkled and ugly. But he'll grow. Tell you what. Let's try an experiment."

Always willing to do what he suggested, and loving the personal attention, I went with him to the shed. He collected a shovel, a rake, and a small brown bag he gave me to carry. He dug the soil in a little dip surrounded by gray bedrock, a spot not much bigger than the tub Mommy bathed the baby in. "Rake it smooth," he said, giving me the long, unwieldy rake. When I was done, he said "Now, poke your finger in the dirt, five little holes, this far apart" he showed me a span of about six inches"one for each of your years. Put a seed in each hole and cover it gently."

"They're wrinkly, too. And ugly." Not much hope for them, either, I thought.

"That's all right. You'll see what happens to small, ugly wrinkly things if they're looked after right.

"Every day it doesn't rain, give your garden a bit of water. In a week, you'll see little green leaves coming out of those wrinkly seeds. If you take good care of your birthday garden, about the time your brother gets hair, you're going to get flowersand some of them will be sort of the color of your hair." The color of my hair? That intrigued me.

Soon, those leaves became bigger, round, and long stems grew out at about the same time as my baby brother stopped looking ugly and started doing things other than cry. By the time he grew fuzzy white hair and fat cheeks, I had a wild riot of color growing in amazing abundance, overflowing that little baby-bath sized garden in the gray rocks. They spilled in glorysprawling stems, green leaves; flowers, orange, yellow, red, striped, more beautiful than I could have imagined and some of them were the color of my hair. Daddy had been right. Just like a wrinkled, unfinished baby brother, my five wrinkled seeds had become something to love, to admire, in which to take pride.

Nasturtiums are still my favorite flower.

My brother's not too bad, either.

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