Jean Lee Cauthen
Gated Garden

I spent an evening once at a home in Virginia. Margo lived with her husband, Vita, and her mother in an old house built on a battlefield. She met Vita while hitchhiking at Berkeley where he studied Greek literature. Margo painted canvases filled with mythology and dreams. Her mother was small and quiet but moved like a dancer.

He, now a chef, professed somewhat jokingly, to be a psychic.

While Vita prepared a simple meal of chicken, I helped Margo assemble a salad. She grabbed a large wooden bowl, then led me down a path to a gated garden. It was a rambunctious, spiraling thing, grown over the ruins of something formal. A raucous tangle of colors, where the living and dying existed and where anything that wanted to could grow. Roses collided with tomatoes, wild slender vines hugged the rails and weeds and wildflowers were all the same. We gathered what we liked and seemed to leave no void.

We shared our meal on a creaky porch where we told our stories and Vita glimpsed our futures.

But not even a psychic could predict I’d forever try to recreate this meal. And one day – I’d endlessly paint the garden that laughed out loud at its own gate.