As I approached the gate to leave our community garden early this evening, I noticed a gentleman standing on the sidewalk near the fence. He seemed to be depositing some sort of trash on the narrow strip of grass between the two, and I waited for him to finish before I exited, because I had a big box that I wanted to drop there, too.
When he saw me waiting, he hastily concluded his business, although he did pause at the fence a little further down the walk way. My attention was drawn to him then, and although we have a large community and I don't know all my fellow gardeners by sight (especially with the COVID restrictions of the last two seasons), it seemed to me that he was not a member.
He carried two grocery bags, one plastic and the other canvas, and I saw that he was filling them with whatever vegetables he could glean from the trash or pick through the fence. I considered my own bag, then, with a quart of cherry tomatoes and a half-dozen or more heirloom tomatoes, too, as well as the squash, beans, and pumpkins I had left in my plot for another day.
And as I lifted my head to call to him, a metro bus pulled up, and he pulled up his mask, shouldered his bags, and was gone.
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