by Hannah Kampen

Created on: November 17, 2010   Last Updated: January 03, 2011

My first garden grew when I was 6 years old. My main crop was violets. For a little girl living in the city with a yard the size of a locker room, this was pretty good. I don't know why, but seeing something that could take dirt, dirt! for Pete's sake, and make something out of it that could be beautiful, like a flower, was just simply amazing. Me being 6, dirt was just boring and yucky. Later in life, I learned that this nasty, dirty dirt could make food. FOOD! I was even more in awe when I realized that the majority of everything we eat comes off of some kind of farm. How could this...brown fertilizer create food? The creation of it, along with the changing chemical compositions, was just fascinating.

Then when I was 22, my little brother was murdered. I cried and cried, I got mad at people, I grieved, I wished his murderer would die. But I kept on my garden. By this time, I had different colors of coleus planted around my rental house, and I loved those little heart shaped shields with the different hues of pink, white and red. I also had a vegetable garden, where I had big rich tomatoes, lovely green peppers, little cornstalks, broccoli, and other such delicacies. I found out, over a course of time, that my little brother was murdered in Iraq by a sergeant who was supposed to be on his side. On Mother's Day. This completely devastated me, since our mother had died the year before. But every day I would sit on my porch and stare listlessly at the road, hoping that my brother would call me and tell me it was all just a sick joke, and Ha! he tricked me. That call never came. Still, my coleus grew and grew, spreading it's heart leaves to me.

I remember one day, I was sitting on my porch and swinging my leg, wondering what I was going to do now, since my brother had been my best friend. I had 3 coleus planted next to my porch, all three green and white speckled. They bowed their little heads to the ground from the heat of the sun, but their hues were still vibrant enough to catch your eye. The poor things, they looked so sad, so I jumped up to get my watering can, and began watering them. I realized that even though the coleus depended on the sun to stay alive, the sun was going to kill them. Mean old sun...just like that sergeant. But they still kept on shining, going to see it through to the very last, when the tips of their shields would hit the pavement, crinkling with dryness. But at least they would have dried out defiantly, their colors refusing to die

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