by Sita

Created on: June 06, 2008   Last Updated: June 26, 2008

Even though its been over a decade, in my mind's eye I can still see the little old Lebanese woman who lived in the big house by the road, taking water by the can-full out of the big rain barrel next to her house and walking it slowly across the stone driveway to her garden. I was just a child, and I once got scolded for referring to her as "the old lady", but she was the oldest person I'd ever seen, and yet she seemed sturdy and worked harder than almost anyone.

She had a certain scent, that now seems to me as though it may have been mint or anise, but at the time seemed to emanate from her like the smell of the foreign land I knew nothing of except it was where she came from. She dressed old-fashioned, in long printed dresses and aprons, and her skin was sun-darkened and wrinkled from years of exposure to daylight. At the crack of dawn she was up and about, tending to her vegetables or grapevines.

Occasionally she would bring a treat to us, rosehips tea or dolmades, made from her grape leaves, that I would taste more out of curiosity than anything else. Aged and full of herb-lore, she seemed wise and exotic, almost magical, and somehow her garden seemed to be the secret to this knowledge.

I didn't realize how truly magical gardening was, however, until the year I decided to plant a garden of my own. We had already moved from the little house by the river, where the old woman was our landlord and closest neighbor.

I'd helped to garden, of course, and my mother had planted flowers for years- but none of them were mine. I started with a small herb garden in my mother's backyard, a square I boxed off with pieces of wooden timber and weeded to near-perfection. I planted tomatos and peppers, and a few simple herbs. As they grew, I would often sit on the edge of the garden and think, remembering the old woman and how much she enjoyed gardening despite the hard work it had looked. I came to understand the gift of watching the plants I planted as mere seeds grow to ripeness, and I harvested and dried the herbs. I taught myself cooking as I learned more about herbs and plants, and I couldn't learn enough about their properties, for cooking, healing, and the esoteric properties that these plants were said to possess. I even started brewing fresh herbal teas, and I found that the rosehips tea I remembered from childhood had another interesting use- it could add beautiful, unharmful red highlights to my brown hair.

The next year my garden was expanded to encompass most

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