A Garden in the Desert

a reflection on two weeks in Amman

I stood on the curb outside the arrivals terminal at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, drops of rain slowly soaking my hair. The cool, damp air didn’t feel so different from a San Francisco summer. Who would’ve thought I’d be wishing I’d packed rainboots for my move to the second-driest country on earth? I’d done my best to come to Jordan without expectations, but the wet weather managed to surprise me. I suppose no new place ever turns out to be quite what we imagined, even if we didn’t imagine anything at all.

It was already dark by the time Nick and I poured ourselves into the car, and my eyelids were heavy as the driver pulled away toward downtown Amman. Still, I could make out a few key features of the terrain: the tall, needle-like silhouettes of Cypress trees, the same black-and-white striped curbs that bounded the streets of Cairo, a sprawling network of construction built into the mountains. A sign pointed toward the Saudi and Iraqi borders, and the West Bank was just an hour’s drive (how small this country is!).

We pulled onto a quiet street, then stopped in front of a limestone apartment building with a low black gate. The ground floor unit on the right would be our home for the next three years. After kicking off muddy shoes and before collapsing into bed, Nick and I quickly toured the place. I raised my eyebrows at some puzzling design choices—a bathroom with every surface tiled in Pepto-Bismol pink, and a hideous faux-wood backsplash in the kitchen. But when we stepped outside to find a wrap-around garden, I couldn’t have cared less about some unsightly finishings. 

Even now, weeks later, I can scarcely believe our luck. This garden is more outdoor space than we’ve had access to in years. Our time in Cairo kept me separated from the earth by way of concrete and smog and high-rise floors. I am ready to feel grass under my feet again. 

This, friends, will be my Eden. My oasis in the desert.

I waited impatiently for the sun to rise the next morning. Jet lag had permitted me just two hours of sleep, and as I lay awake, I thought about all the things I might see in the garden in daylight. In my mind, it was a half-finished puzzle, and I was eager to find the missing pieces that would reveal the full image. At first light, I slipped on my sneakers and a quilted jacket, then stumbled out the sliding glass door to survey my dominion in the cold winter sun. 

In the back I found a carport, a couple balconies, and a little vegetable garden. A strip of lawn ran along the side closest to the street. The rest was covered in soil—terra rossa, the red clay of the Mediterranean, the same shade of vermillion as the cinnabar ore that tints the hills of my childhood home in Northern California. The rain had turned the clay into a slurry, like the thick, slick suspension you’d find in a potter’s studio, just waiting to be shaped into something beautiful and useful. 

Planted in the red earth was a lemon tree, and another that looked as though it might one day bear olives. There were pepper plants, both hot and sweet. I bent over a cluster of familiar-looking leaves, a shiny, dark green with reddish stalks. I rubbed them between my fingers, held them up to my nose. The scent was cool and astringent: mint. 

I could grow a whole kitchen’s worth of groceries here and harvest it all myself, straight from the ground.

Over my first week in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, it became clear to me how it earned the nickname “The Hashemite Kingdom of Boredom.” It is quiet and orderly—so orderly, in fact, that cussing is technically a criminal offense (by the time I learned of this law I should have been arrested several times over, but I suppose that’s what diplomatic immunity is for). Despite being home to four million souls, Amman still manages to feel sleepy. The shouting, fist fighting, and car accidents that were commonplace in Cairo felt conspicuously absent. The biggest source of friction in my life was the soggy weather, which kept me from venturing out into my new city.

At least the garden let me get some fresh air, and my six-month-old puppy, Boo, nearly came unglued at having a whole yard to herself. The rain delighted and riled her even more. For days, Boo zoomed back and forth in the mud, staining her paws red and getting clumps of clay under her nails. She left tracks all over our white tile floors. Soon I couldn’t find a single pair of pants that weren’t covered in filth from trying, futilely, to wipe her clean as she wriggled away.

There was no help for it but to cover the mud with sod, so Nick asked Abu Younes, our bawab (a sort of doorman-cum-gardener-cum-handyman) to arrange for installation. A day or two later, Abu Younes waylaid me in the street. I could tell he had a question, but I’m ashamed to say that it was unintelligible to me; I still speak barely a word of Arabic. I did try to learn in Cairo—for a couple of months at least, before running home to California to take care of my dying father. I never got back on the wagon after that, because why bother with a difficult new tongue when no words, in any language, could capture my grief?

I sheepishly told Abu Younes asfa, mish arabi. Sorry, no Arabic.

Shuf, he said—look—and he beckoned me to the back of my building, where the fuel tanks that heat the apartments sit in large black lockers. He crouched over a patch of unnaturally green grass and picked it up, showing me its rubber bottom. Keda? He asked. Like this? 

It was real sod I wanted, not turf. But “sod” is not a word I learned in my six or so Arabic seminars, so I would have to act it out, supplementing my theatrics with whatever pidgin phrases I could string together. I looked around, and spied a wild little patch near my neighbors’ unit. I shuffled over to it and pointed. 

Mumkin keda? I asked. Possible like this?

Abu Younes ran a hand along it. He nodded, then pointed to the turf and to the natural grass in turn. Keda, walla keda? Like that, or like this? 

Di. Mumkin? This. Possible?

Aywa, khalas. Yes—it’s done.

I asked Nick to tell Abu Younes to leave the vegetable garden uncovered. I wanted to see what I could propagate there myself.

It was days before the sod was laid down. I was fully witting of the fact that we were on Arab time and thus it would take as long as it took, but still, I counted the minutes. Today? I asked Nick each morning for a week. Are they putting it down today? Maybe today? With the weather muddying the yard and keeping me indoors, I had nothing else to fixate on.

Then finally, there was a break in the rain. Two men arrived with a truckload of coils like giant, earthen Swiss rolls. They unfurled them one by one, turning our yard from red to green. Abu Younes said the more we walked on the new grass the better the roots would take, so I took Boo outside to let her sniff it. While she weaved back and forth huffing strip after strip, I tamped bits of new lawn down with my feet. It compressed as softly and gently as memory foam. I imagined walking barefoot through the garden in the summer, feeling the individual blades between my toes.

The first stars were appearing in a lilac sky; it was nearly time for dinner. Before calling Boo back inside, I picked a ripe lemon from the tree. It fit perfectly in my palm, hard and smooth as a marble, and I cut it open in the kitchen. I licked a drop of juice from my fingertips. It was almost sweet enough to drink. I thought of fresh-squeezed lemonade, of citrus peels I could candy and spoon into jars, and of how I liked this quiet life, where I cared about nothing more than grass and soil and what might grow in it.

I looked out to the living room. There were little red paw prints all over the floor. Boo had stepped in the mud in the seams between the new strips of lawn. After all that, we were back where we’d started. But lawns don’t grow thick and lush in a day; they need time to take root. My garden will have to be patiently tended until the patches of sod can stitch themselves together, like a patchwork quilt to cover the mud. 

Besides, when the dry season comes, the clay will crack and bake in the sun, leaving no moisture to muddy Boo’s paws or to water my lemon tree. The rain is sacred. It will replenish the cisterns of this water-poor city, and help my desert garden flourish. It will let me cultivate something here—tomatoes, a patch of herbs. Some lavender. A life.