a stellar smashing

This is a section from the creative essay I wrote this past semester for my Prose Forms class. The essay was entitled “Growing Things,” as in the act of and things that do. Even though the essay contained a lot of personal experiences, this one turned out to be the most…emotional, I suppose.

“Irrigation”

Summers in the Midwest can be hot and dry, and the garden needs cool, dank moisture to absorb nutrients and avoid dehydration. After a particularly harsh July day, the plants thirst and the soil is dusty and broken. It needs water.

Wait until the sun has almost dripped out of the sky, and then attach several lengths of hose to each other and to the spigot at the back of your house. Turn the rusty spigot until it creaks, until it won’t turn anymore, and then walk out to your garden, stretching the lengths of hose behind you. Attach a nozzle to the end. It doesn’t need to be one of those colorful plastic cones that look like something you’d shower under. It just needs to produce a steady, strong spray. It just needs to bring water.

Take your shoes off. If you’re not wearing shorts, roll the hem of your pants to your knees. Coil as much of the hose as you can around your arm or over your shoulder so you can flex it and bend it and control it, and then step into the garden. Feel the cool soil between your toes and wiggle them, letting the dirt tickle the tops of your feet. Laugh.

Point the nozzle at the sky, out and up and away from your body, as far as you can reach. Squeeze the handle, and feel the water course through each inch of the hose and explode from the nozzle in a spray of water droplets that dazzle like jewels of every color of the tragic sunset dying in the opposite horizon. Walk, slowly, between each row of your garden and let the water shake the leaves of your plants. Let it hit the soil and make thick mud that splatters chocolaty drops up to your knees. Let the spray drift on your face and arms, and relish the creeping shiver that raises the fine hairs on the back of your neck.

Lower your arm and point the spray at the earth. Let the water reach to every vein of every leaf, to every finger of every root. Let your plants feel this sweet rescue. Let them rest in cool, dark quiet tonight.

This is your rainstorm.