Now that I have a balcony, I'm hoping to create a little garden in it, a place where I can go and sit and be quiet (despite the ambient noise of the city) and have something pretty to look at.
Once, when I was young and living at home with my parents, I had a small patch in the backyard that was "my" garden, where I planted bachelor's buttons and zinnias (it also had a couple of trilliums that we'd nicked from the side of the road on Highway 69. Actually, it's illegal to pick trilliums; so we dug them up whole and entire with their roots, including one very rare red one. Highway 69 was being widened, and so they were doomed, anyhow). I was so pleased that I had this little patch, that was just mine. The rest of the backyard was given over to my dad's vegetables. That tiny little backyard yielded more tomatoes and green beans than we could handle, and we ended up giving a lot of the vegetables away. My dad's a dab hand at gardening, and it's only been a few years since he stopped growing tomatoes (which on the foggy Nova Scotia coast, is quite a feat), and that's when I knew he was slowing down.
I haven't had a garden since (houseplants don't count, for me). A garden is a refuge, a place to go when you need to be reminded God exists.