Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart Read Online Free

How could he have the time to work here as well?
    Yet the face was unmistakable. And he gave off a distinctive energy, as if he idled at a higher speed than everybody else. I’d found the author of my charming, hand-delivered note, but he wasn’t sitting at a desk waxing poetic or even tending flowers in a garden. Instead, engaged in conversation with a customer, he lowered celery hearts into a paper bag with care, as if it were the most delightful and important job in the world.
    I noticed a carousel rack holding gift cards just a few feet away from the line where Giles Owita was bagging groceries. I pretended to be engrossed in browsing and was careful to keep the rack between me and the register. There could be no sane argument for why I felt the need to spy on him, and yet for some reason I was compelled. Giles Owita looked to be about my age, around fifty. He wore khaki pants, a white knit shirt, and his navy Foodland apron tied at the waist. He leaned over the counter, snagging groceries from the rolling belt, comfortable even when he stood off-balance. He seemed to like making things easier for others. As I watched, he grasped a can of soup that rolled beyond the cashier. He deftly scooped up a receipt that slipped from a customer’s grasp to the polished floor. His hands performed repetitive tasks, but he never seemed bored or resentful. He seemed like a man who’d already found the peace that everyone on God’s green earth was searching for.
    Something else struck me as I watched him work. He seemed more comfortable, more at ease than when I’d seen him working in Sarah’s yard. Was it because he knew that I was watching him then? I wondered again what he’d thought of the white neighbor lady hitting the brakes. Did he feel threatened when I slowed so abruptly, just enough to stare at him, but not to raise a hand in greeting? Was my creeping vehicle suggestive of neighborly disapproval?
    I should have stopped the van, gotten out, and introduced myself. Then, we might have exchanged the brief “hello” that changed everything between two people. How could I have gotten such a simple thing so wrong?
Oh, Lord,
I prayed.
It’s me again—Carol. Please help me to be the kind of person my parents raised.
I’d always prided myself on being hypersensitive to racial insult and misunderstanding. I so hoped that I hadn’t been guilty of making Giles Owita uncomfortable. My parents would have been utterly disgusted with me if I had—that was not what a “quality person” did, my mother would have said. A quality person knew that we were all the same under the skin.
    When I was five years old, in the summer of 1956, my parents, younger sister, and I traveled to Mississippi to visit our cousins who lived in Pascagoula, on the Gulf Coast. It was the first time in my life that I had been faced with segregated bathrooms and water fountains, and at the age of five I had no idea what I was seeing. The farther south we traveled from our home in southwest Virginia, the more we noticed the strange signs. How well I remembered my mother looking down at the sidewalk when I asked what the signs on the two identical water fountains meant. The silence was heavy as we stood before those fountains, all of us hot and thirsty in the days before air-conditioning. There was no way for me to know what could cause my mother’s lovely eyes with their long lashes to look so sad. There was something she didn’t want to tell me. It was an odd sensation, because in normal circumstances, she was always eager to explain the world to us. I couldn’t read yet, but it was perfectly obvious that the letters on the placards (“Colored” and “White”) were there for a reason. I don’t recall the words my mother spoke, but I do recall the weary regret in her voice and the way she held our hands protectively as we stole a drink, or so it seemed, from one of the fountains. She, on the other hand, couldn’t bring herself to take a sip.
    My