The gardener could feel the chill in...

The gardener could feel the chill in the political climate. It was different than when he’d come. He’d had no papers, but a man had to work, and he had a family and no money. He’d borrowed a truck, left Mexico and vowed to get straight with the migra as soon as he could.

He was not soon enough. One night, he was caught. Go back to Mexico, the lawman warned, or we’ll send you back forcibly. It was a familiar story: He mourned, and so did his family. And so, eventually, did his clients because with his departure, life in the suburb where he’d worked became a shade less green.

The gardener had known just how to make things blossom, how to coax beauty from the most arid soil. How to rake and plant so that the leaf blower was scarcely needed, how to prune so that the next spring’s blooms would be doubly lush.

He’d had skill, but in this country, you also need magic, and magic, it seemed, had not been on his side. One week, he was smiling and waving to satisfied clients; the next, he was back where he’d started from.

Without him, things began to unravel. Lawns he had tended suddenly went brown. Rose beds got weedy. Oranges hardened. Other gardeners tried to replace him, but none had his touch.

In the months after his departure, spirits also seemed to wither; California’s long love-hate affair with people like him took a turn for the worse. Signs for Proposition 187, the anti-immigrant initiative, sprouted in yards he’d once weeded, put there by housewives who’d served him ice water the summer before.

At the house on one corner, an entire bed of marigolds shriveled. Was it just a coincidence? The gardener’s old customers weren’t so sure. All they knew was that, when he left, something went out of balance. Nothing was thriving anymore.

*

There are layers of reality here in the Southern California suburbs. Worlds cross-pollinate in ways we don’t understand. We are the cradle of the wedge politics of immigration, and at the same time, we are the changing face of the new America.

We pass petitions that rail against bilingual education even as our kids campaign for student body president en espanol. We make small talk about the “Asian money” political scandal in front of the country club tennis pro whose English is so flawless we keep forgetting she was born in Seoul.

We love each other and we hate each other, but more than either, we affect each other, inexorably, whether we like it or not. When the gardener was in the suburb, he’d seemed just another part of the landscape, just another bent-over worker with a bandanna on his face and a leaf blower strapped to his back. And yet when he was gone, people missed him more than they ever would have thought.

Time passed. To an outsider, the suburb would have seemed no different. But beneath the surface, the gardener’s old customers were weary, the way people get after a long, hateful fight. The Proposition 187 signs began to disappear from the landscape; the governor who’d urged their planting became a lame duck.

The local economy awakened from its slumber. The mood that had run the gardener from the country began to pass. It was coming on springtime when, like a sign of a new season, there came the rattle of a familiar engine: The gardener had returned.

*

It had taken him years, but he had found his way back across the border. It was his intention to pick up where he’d left off. He finally had papers, which nobody asked for. From house to house, he drove in his borrowed, dilapidated truck, and, at house after house, he was rehired.

Quietly, he again became a neighborhood fixture. He moved back to his old apartment, put his children back in their old school. And last week, while the suburb was celebrating Christmastime, the gardener’s wife went from house to house passing out Christmas cards.

Some were in Spanish, some in English, translated by his son, who is now in the sixth grade. “Que en esta navidad y ano nuevo Dios te bendiga ati y a toda tu familia,” began the note on one card. “In this year and all of years, may Jesus bless you and your family,” another said.

And then came the rest of the message, the part that tucked itself into people’s hearts like the seed of some indigenous sprout: “Persons like you and your family, there’s only a cople in this world,” the gardener’s wife wrote haltingly. “I give you thanks because when we needed your help, you were there for us by giving my husband his job back.”

That was all. Surely there was nothing mysterious about it. Just one heart reaching out to another in the arid soil of suburbia. And yet, as people read it, almost magically, the oranges seemed oranger, the grass seemed greener. Once again, the climate seemed to be changing. You didn’t need to be a gardener to feel something blossoming.