Garden

Memories are often tied to places. My best childhood memories are connected to a garden at my grandparents’ house.  It was small and full of life – flowers, vegetables, birds and the occasional stray cat. With time my memories changed.  The garden transformed into a mythical place. It became central in my personal narrative, a place of exploration, play, excitement and safety. When I think of the place now,  I remember the birds – swallows that nested in the same spot every year, tiny brown and gray owls on the roofs at twilight, crows, sparrows and my pet parakeets. Their lives integrated into the fabric of daily life. I recall the rose bushes, the massive hydrangeas and a pumpkin patch. And I think of roots in the literal sense and what they symbolize. Questions of belonging or not, of having roots in this place or being “rootless” in this town and this country.

These are some of the concepts that kept coming back when I was working on the show: hidden spaces, safe spaces, roots, having roots or not having them, fading memories, glimpses, wishing to go back and wishing to belong to a place, fiercely missing people already gone and missing the garden. At the end all I hoped to achieve is to recreate a feeling of a space that was well loved, a suggestion of time passing and a sense life’s impermanence.