#20 Garden Walk

June 2023 | West Chester, Pennsylvania

The greenery here is different, I can’t quite explain. It’s too…green, I don’t know. It’s lush, but with a strange, almost yellow aura. Like somebody shined a flashlight behind a leaf. Like it was dipped into something radioactive, something poisonous, something tropical somehow. It is lush in a wet kind of way. Wet like the humid East Coast air, the feel of which I’d forgotten after living in dry, landlocked Armenia for so long, wedged between mountains in the valley that is Yerevan, a comfortable spring warmth. A bluer green against a rocky terrain. Lush too, but different. Wind, and dust carried with it. Here it is heavy, stifling.

Along the winding suburban forest roads, it grows almost uninhibited. Penn’s Woods feel more like a jungle. 

Then there are the gardens, the parks, the DuPont estates scattered across Pennsylvania and Delaware. Greenery. Nature, yes, but kept in check, manicured like the lawns I drive by when I head to the apteka – no, the drugstore, the CVS, you can’t say apteka here, not outside of the family, nobody will understand you. 

“Look at that,” my mother declares with admiration as we walk the flowered path that snakes through the grounds of some dead DuPont’s estate. “Not a dandelion in sight, not a single one!”

Well, that’s because they groom the lawns, I think. Take out all that grows freely, plant seeds, all part of a plan. Nature in check. Great big bunches of hydrangeas growing on trees, purple and yellow irises, lily of the valley – “my favorite,” mom says. They make me think of the wildflowers I’d walk through on a hike in Armenia. Red poppies with black in the middle. Forget-me-nots, tulips, crocuses. 

I think of the flowers that must be growing there right now, cropping up in the bottoms of the gorges, swaying over cemeteries built into hillsides, and I miss them. 

But for all the flora, there was just as much litter. The plastic bags tangled up in bush branches along that hiking trail through the caves of Goris, swaying with the wind. The plastic coffee cups and cigarette butts. We’ve got a real problem with trash, don’t we? Not everything was perfect. I have to remind myself of this when I take to romanticizing too heavily.

There is no trash here in this garden, but still. 

The birds are different too. They sing their songs and bring me right back to my childhood, bring me back to my fourteen-year-old self, bring me back to my insecurities. They are not the birds whose voices I came to know in Yerevan every morning when I’d wake up and peer out the window to see pink tuf and gray apartment buildings outlined against a blue, blue sky. 

We continue walking, and my mania is spinning, screaming, thinking too hard again. Reflecting. Calm with the surrounding nature, the twittering birds, and spinning with the mental juxtaposition of here and there, nature against the city. Scratch that. A manufactured naturescape against a Soviet city. Perhaps they are not so different. 

Screaming or soothed, somehow it is both. My mother walks so slowly that I feel I might fall asleep right here, while my feet keep walking me forward. 

Maybe I do need a break. On a normal weekend in Yerevan, I’d be doing a million things. Hopping from place to place, seeing people, interacting. I am an introvert, but I loved this. Needed it. Cultural exchange. Everyone and everything. 

Here there are flowers and those birds. Alien birds. East Coast birds. I do not know them anymore. I am not of this place anymore. But I am also tired, and overstimulated after the city. Maybe this is what I need?

If you’d like to go back and read my past musings and meltdowns, hit this link.