More than just a garden…

This story is evolving as I write.

One day 2 years or so ago a woman came to the Cygnet Community Garden for the first time. She was from Queensland, she said, and was here doing some house sitting. The regulars at the garden showed her around and she knuckled down amongst us for a couple of hours gardening. She was nice to be with and was most impressed with our lunch spread when we stopped work at 12 noon. I hoped she would come again. She did and she continued to, whenever her house sitting brought her close enough to Cygnet.

Then, one day she said she was going back to Queensland to see her family and may or may not come back to Cygnet, depending on if she could find more house sitting. We missed her a lot and every week we asked each other if anyone had heard from her. It wasn’t long before someone had a phone call and someone else had an email, all suggesting that she was returning soon, and that her daughter and grand children would be coming for a visit too, in a new house sitting arrangement she had found in Randall’s Bay, not far from Cygnet.

She had found a little house by the sea and decided she wanted to stay….. forever. It soothes your soul by the sea and she had become quite fond of us at the community garden and some others in a craft group she had joined.

To cut a long story short, she has sold up in Queensland and bought a house in Cygnet, not Randall’s Bay, after all. She is arriving this week and we have some house warming surprises for her; I dare not say what they are as she may read this blog piece! But I suspect the best present will be seeing the faces of friends she has already made and knowing that they will help her settle in and adapt to her new life.

Community gardens are deep. Rivers run through them and energy flows in many directions. Our community garden is a haphazard, grass-infested, quite unkempt looking garden that those who look with their hearts, minds and souls (rather than just their eyes) see as a wonderful, strong, peaceful web where the food produced is only a part of the story.