Tío Juan Quotes in Seedfolks
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
Watching him carefully sprinkling [the seeds] into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.
I got into it. Every day something new. The first flower bud. Then those first yellow flowers. Then the tomatoes growing right behind ‘em. This old man with no teeth and a straw hat showed me how to tie the plants up to stakes.
You drop bread on the ground and birds come out of nowhere. Same with that garden. People just appeared, people you didn’t know were there. Royce was like that.
A fact bobbed up from my memory, that the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. It was a mind-altering drug we took daily.
Tío Juan Quotes in Seedfolks
He’d been a farmer, but here he couldn’t work. He couldn’t sit out in the plaza and talk—there aren’t any plazas here, and if you sit out in public some gang driving by might use you for target practice. He couldn’t understand TV. So he wandered around the apartment all day, in and out of rooms, talking to himself, just like a kid in diapers.
Watching him carefully sprinkling [the seeds] into the troughs he’d made, I realized that I didn’t know anything about growing food and that he knew everything. I stared at his busy fingers, then his eyes. They were focused, not faraway or confused. He’d changed from a baby back into a man.
I got into it. Every day something new. The first flower bud. Then those first yellow flowers. Then the tomatoes growing right behind ‘em. This old man with no teeth and a straw hat showed me how to tie the plants up to stakes.
You drop bread on the ground and birds come out of nowhere. Same with that garden. People just appeared, people you didn’t know were there. Royce was like that.
A fact bobbed up from my memory, that the ancient Egyptians prescribed walking through a garden as a cure for the mad. It was a mind-altering drug we took daily.
