Catherine


 * Marie**

I don't remember anything from my first year of life in Paris, France. My older sister who was 4 when we moved says that she remembers beautiful bits and pieces and by telling about them, she says that that is how she makes her many friends at her fancy boarding school. I never had friends. It seemed like a good concept, playing, laughing, secret sharing, but that's all it was to me. Until that first summer in the garden.

My mother told me that I would have to get out of the apartment and do something over the summer because it wasn't natural for a 10 year old to be cooped up all the time, so I went for a walk. For the rest of May and the beginning of June I walked the same route every day. I met very nice people that walked on different days of the week so I always had a very nice companion to walk with. I walked the same route every day and today was no different. I was walking with a nurse named Nora and her patient named Mr. Miles when it started to rain. We said hasty goodbyes and she made sure that I would get home okay and then they headed in the direction of an apartment building overhang. I had seen a girl that I recognized from my building take a turn down a different street than most everyone who lives in my building takes to get home from where we were. I figured that it must be a shortcut home because who would want to go anywhere else in that rain? I turned a corner and saw something that surprised me. She wasn't going home at all, she was running to check on her plants in the garden.

__The__ next morning I wrote a note to leave Mother about where I was going and when I'd be back and then I left with 10 dollars and an open mind. Outside it was gorgeous, the perfect spring day for a walk. I walked all the way across town to the hardware store and bought a spade and work gloves. I thought of the girl yesterday in the garden and ran out of the store as fast as I could manage. As a matter of fact, I ran all the way across town, back to the garden. I reached into my pocket and found the wheat grain that I had put there before I had left the apartment in the morning. I looked at the dirt patch I had picked out to plant my wheat in and realized how much work it would be to grow anything here, much less make it into bread.

I started turning the ground with my spade and working up a sweat in the mid-June heat. While I was working I saw a shadow out of my right eye, it was the girl I had followed here the day before.

"Hello," she said in an accent I didn't recognize. "My name is Kim. What's yours?"

"Marie," I said back to her. "Where does your accent come from?" I asked.

"I'm Vietnamese, and you're French?"

"Oui." We both laughed and I turned back to my work in the ground.

"Do you need any help?" Kim offered.

"I don't think so, but thank you."

"I could . ."

"No!" I yelled with surprising force, even to me. I didn't know why these plants were all of a sudden so important to me. Kim backed away and then turned and walked, slightly shocked, out of the garden. I kept working, probably as shocked as Kim was. I guess the only possible friend I had ever had, I scared off.

That night I thought of ways to apologize to Kim. I decided that I should take some other wheat and go down to the bakery where I know the baker, make some bread, write a nice note and put it on her vegetable patch tomorrow before she got there.

The next day I put my plan into motion and delivered the package to her patch right before she arrived in the morning. I watched her pick up the bread and saw her read the note. She looked around and saw me.

She ran over and gushed, "This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me."

"I thought you were mad," I asked.

"What? No, I wasn't mad at all," she answered.

I was so surprised. I thought she was furious at me for yelling at her.

But she said, "I assumed you were just having a hard day and wanted to be alone."

I gave her a big hug and I knew that I had finally found a friend.

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