But Gonzalo’s mother asks him to take Tío Juan back with seeds. One day, Gonzalo loses track of his great-uncle and finds him trying to talk to Wendell, who’s digging a garden in the abandoned lot. This is why Gonzalo has to watch his great-uncle Tío Juan after school-Tío Juan doesn’t speak English or Spanish (he speaks a regional dialect) and gets lost if he wanders away. It took Gonzalo two years to learn English after emigrating from Guatemala, while none of his older relatives can function in the English-speaking world of Cleveland.

When he returns later, he decides to plant a garden for himself. It’s Kim, who’s come to water her plants, and she’s terrified of Wendell. After he waters the first one, he hears something behind him. Wendell realizes that the beans have survived the cold thanks to the nearby refrigerator bouncing sunlight down onto the soil. He identifies the parched plants as beans and grudgingly agrees to water them. Wendell is angry when he finds that Ana is just upset that Kim’s plants down in the vacant lot haven’t been watered in several days. One morning, Ana wakes up Wendell, a neighbor on the first floor, with a concerning request to come upstairs quickly. She replants the seeds and buys binoculars. Ana feels horrible when her digging turns up sprouted bean seeds.

Knowing that Kim will move her treasure now that she’s been discovered, Ana hobbles down to the lot to see what Kim buried. She watches for several days until one day, Kim looks up into Ana’s window before running away. Since the neighborhood is a violent one, Ana assumes Kim is burying drugs or a gun. Looking out the window, Ana notices a little girl (Kim) digging in the lot. It’s changed over the years, but it’s always been an immigrant neighborhood and nobody stays long. She doesn’t know if his spirit even knows who she is, but she believes that if she shows him that she can cultivate plants like he did, he’ll be proud of her.Īna has lived in the same apartment on Gibb Street since she arrived in the country in 1919, at four years old. As she digs, she thinks of her father, who was a farmer in Vietnam and died before she was born. She wades through the trash in the neighboring vacant lot and finds a spot behind an old refrigerator. It’s a blustery and cold spring day-but it barely seems like spring to Kim, who is from Vietnam and is accustomed to much warmer weather. The day after her father’s death anniversary, nine-year-old Kim takes a handful of dried lima beans from the kitchen, fills a jar with water, and sneaks outside. It follows a community garden in Cleveland from its first crops planted in April through the March of the following year. Seedfolks takes the form of short stories, each narrated by a different person.

Seedfolks by paul fleischman