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THE URBAN GARDEN
When I lived in upstate New York and New Hampshire, I always had a garden, diligently planned over the winter by poring through seed catalogs and gridding garden plots on graph paper. Like all gardeners, I had my planting scheme (peas as soon as the ground could take it), my bug defense (flat beer for snails), and, in the autumnal garden end-game, my strategies for freezing and canning. In-between I would pluck the weeds and squish the potato bugs and savage the cutworms, glorying in playing a minimal Adam in a tag-end of Eden.

When I moved to Somerville, MA, I thought I would have to give up gardening. But bordering the south side of the house, laved with about six to seven hours of light a day, stretched a scalene triangle of dirt - true, weed- and trash-infested dirt, but dirt nonetheless.

Elm Street is not the most propitious place for agriculture; its biggest crop is cars, its largest harvest flurries of trash settling in from Porter Square. And this particular wedge of land acted like a trash magnet, a Capistrano of trash to which would return every piece of litter loosed in the world. I convinced the landlord to spring for some basic tools, and one day, toting my new leather garden gloves, the pristine tines of a yard rake, and the unscuffed blade of a shovel, I descended to the land.

I became an archeologist of trash. On the first day I loaded five 39-gallon trash bags with every species of coffee cup and candy wrapper every made. This didn't include the amputated limbs of the incipient forest poking up along the foundation wall and along the chainlink fence. Over the course of the next two trash days, I set almost fifteen full bags in drill-order rectitude along the curb. I was now ready to start planting.

But a curious kind of reclamation had also been happening alongside bringing the soil back to the sun. The MBTA had placed a bus stop just off our front porch, and an overfill parking lot, shoehorned in by the Porter Square mall management, edged the garden, so the sidewalk in front of our house fairly brimmed with pedestrians all day long. As I started unearthing some unearthly garbage, I noticed people noticing me as I worked. Not in what I would call a friendly way, but in traditional alienated urban fashion: a quick flick of eyes in my direction, a blink of contact, maybe a tight smile, then moving on. Finally a woman on her way to Star Market said, "Great, someone's cleaning this up. Good job." As I nodded my thanks to her, her remark

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