It was a suburban evening at her grandparents' very suburban home. Six o'clock, and almost time for dinner, the buzzing, insect silence ruling as men retreated indoors with their rumblings bellies, passing time by watching the evening news. Near a week they'd been there, and on this sixth day she'd left her room for the outdoors, sick of television and window gazing. Into the kitchen and out the back door, the smells of spaghetti, fried chicken, and rolls wafting out briefly before claimed by the humidity.

The yard was large, bare, a shed in the back left corner. And to the right, a smallish rectangle of land, reclaiming itself. Her grandfather no longer worked there -- just two years from then his wife would have the old plot obliterated entirely, hiring those foreign anglo men in red-checkered shirts to pull up the iron gate foundation, burn away the more tenacious weeds and remnant vegetable stems, and soil and seed that untamed earth -- but she was drawn to that neglected, forgotten half-acre. In this summer-space she stopped, the hot wind carrying the smell of wet and crickets, the sound of ladybugs with their buzzing wings and other things her grandfather had loved, allotting to them always a branch or two (but no more) of leafy green to feast on.

It was odd, though. He had worked by morning, and daylight. The ground seemed almost shrunken without him, and without his whistling. It seemed smaller. Faded to reflect that man now no more than a shadow, his voice still its warm scratching, but clouded.

How to describe a voice? Or a man? Or his garden -- the happy transformation from his sharecropping days.

· · · · · · · · · ·

At dinner they sit down to ham, chicken, yams -- and collard greens, grandfather's favorite. They are store-bought now, but they taste near enough the same.