Dismantling the Garden

I went by last week and dismantled the old garden.

Actually, someone beat me to it. I had told Ray, the gardener who spends the most time there (this is at an apartment building where the roof of the parking garage is garden space), that I wouldn't be working the old plot anymore, and someone else had gotten started already, laying out the tomato cages and neatly stacking the stanchions and the electrical conduit pipes I had used for trellis frames.

I picked everything up as M and G raced around the wide open green space of that garden.

Of course the sadness I feel isn't just for the space and the soil, but for the chapter of my life there ending for good, but I some small portion of the sadness is for the garden itself, for the wide open potential of looking at as much space as I had time to work (or didn't have time to work), for the rich, dark soil that came from years of mulching and adding compost, to the hours shooting the breeze with Ray and the other gardeners. I'm cutting back to open space for other adventures and fulfilling activities, but it still feels like cutting back.