INTRODUCTION

My name is Gladys Mueller and what follows is not my story. Before I had my two kids, I had a job caring for people who were old or sick and in the course of that job, I met Eva Sparks. Eva was a real character, kind of old fashioned in some ways but before her time in so many other ways. Eva told me that she had always kept journals. In one series of notebooks, she wrote about her days and the people she knew. In it, she wrote about her one true love in words I don’t imagine she ever thought another person would read. In the other set of notebooks, she wrote about her garden, what she planted and what she ripped out in fits of pique or sadness. Both journals essentially told the same story.

Eva didn’t have any family or friends left when she died and her friend Gayle told me I could keep the several volumes of notebooks to remember Eva by. I haven’t added a word to what she wrote except to put the words from each of the notebooks’ stories together. This book is Eva’s story of growing plants and tending people. The notebooks are like a mitzpah coin where two friends or lovers each have half, all I did was put them together so you could see the design of the whole coin.

The house where Eva lived and kept her garden is gone now, taken by imminent domain. It was flooded over when they made the reservoir, so there is no garden today. You’ll never find it if you should be of a mind to go looking for it. Curiously though, I have the key to the side door of Eva’s house, now more than forty feet under water. Unless I suddenly take up scuba diving, I imagine that the small key will never be reconciled with its lock. Maybe I’ll go to the reservoir someday. Maybe I will go about to where I figure Eva’s house must be, but all the landmarks are lost. I guess could still throw that key into the current and hope it would find its own way home. In other ways, it feels like it would be giving up or abandoning this stalwart reminder of a friend. For now, Eva’s house key hangs nestled with others on my key ring on a nail next to my own backdoor. Maybe I can keep the key safe in ways I could never keep Eva safe.

Eva’s garden was never abandoned though. I suppose in some ways it lives on in all the plant starts she gave away and in the seeds she collected and passed about, now planted in new soil. But Eva’s magnificent garden will never be seen again the way it was. I know she would chide me here as she would exclaim that a garden, any garden, was never the same, even from day to day. So the garden she saw is gone and now Eva is gone too. She never had any children, so the only thing left to even prove she was here is this bunch of stories—less than some have left over at the end of a life and a far sight more than most.

In some places, Eva’s writing is full of detail and in others her writing is sparse, like an idea she planned to return to and explore further, but she never did, at least on paper. Like I said, I didn’t add a single word. This is Eva’s story of a plot of land and a life that, as she put it, “never did add up to much.”

I am sure some people thought she was crazy. I know I did when I first met her. Now I think of her as some wild vine planted in bad dirt. Eva was a vine that had to cling as she could and twist as she must to get just a little bit of sunshine. That seems a fair enough explanation, but I guess you can judge that for yourself.