Intersections: One way to cultivate neighborliness

One late summer afternoon as the fireflies danced among overgrown weeds and discarded particle boards in the alley, my neighbor climbed up to his roof and sat at its highest peak. Like a living, breathing Bangladeshi gargoyle, he looked out beyond his garden to the amber and purple sky bleeding into the shadows of the houses on our street.

His lush domain surrounded him, squash vines cascading down the roof, chili pepper and tomato plants planted in neatly lined rows, cucumber and eggplant in every crevice. His garden wasn’t the only one that looked this way.

Mine did too, but it wasn’t because I was resourceful, it was because he was. My neighbor and his wife have taken over my garden. They planted their pepper plants in pots laid out across my yard and strung up their bean vines on trellises just a few feet away from my back door.

They tilled my small patch of soil and watered their tomato plants along the edges of a supposed border that separates my space from theirs.

They are in my garden, planting, pruning and lurking around. I’ve woken up several mornings, looked out the window and found them hunched over in my soil, prepping it for their seeds.

All of our exchanges have been friendly. I have spent more time agonizing over the situation about how I can tell them that this is my space, not theirs, to myself than I have nervously explaining why I’d like my garden back — the first one that I have ever had.

In their eyes, if I am not utilizing the prize soil, it means they should be. The boundaries are blurred, but I guess this is what happens in a city like Detroit, a place that has lost a lot of things, but not space.

All summer long, I watched them in my yard, half furious, and half curious, to see what would happen to the garden and also if I would muster up the energy to tell them to respect my space.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m not using it as well as you are,” I muttered to myself. It’s still my garden, and I have the right to let it exist without being an incubator for a harvest.

I was stuck somewhere between the principle of what it means to have ownership of a space and something bigger than my own selfish feelings: the importance of injecting value into land many would consider worthless.

When you live in a place like Detroit, a conscious resident who realizes how significant the idea of community and growth is, who sees how high the stakes are here in “America’s Comeback City,” the latter tends to win.

So I relented. I let the garden succumb to the resourceful green thumbs of my neighbors. I decided not to get upset that they were using my space, but feel hopeful they might share some of their expertly grown chili peppers with me.

I waved hello to them once in a while, and trimmed weeds around the garden as they watered the tomatoes. They didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Bengali, but we somehow managed to understand each other, the situation and the high stakes, without exchanging any words.

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LIANA AGHAJANIAN is a Los Angeles-based journalist whose work has appeared in L.A. Weekly, Paste magazine, New America Media, Eurasianet and The Atlantic. She may be reached at liana.agh@gmail.com.