It's been almost two weeks since I've written a blog, or anything else for that matter. I'd felt the flow from the tap steadily diminishing until the writing was trickling out, and I finally decided to let it stop. I've been writing nearly every day, in one form or another, since August of 2005, and at some point you just get clogged up. What do you do then? Be still, take stock of what you've done, make new plans, and try to think of a story to write that is so important you have to get it out. In the meantime, I've been enjoying the stillness of my neighbors' urban garden....

Chicago is not very green and feels like a windswept concrete universe if you live on the south side. Carolyn met Beth working on the Zoppe Family Circus last summer and we have gradually gotten to be friends with her and her husband Willy. They are a few years older than we are, urban pioneers, and knowing them has given us both hope that you can actually break through the hard surface crust of city life and root down.

Beth bought a building on 18th St. in Pilsen almost 20 years ago. She was very young, the neighborhood was still very dangerous, but she went for it with a few borrowed thousands and a large bank loan. Now she owns the building and the abandoned convent across the street, whose neighboring lots she and Willy have turned into a secret garden.

Pilsen, like many of Chicago's south side neighborhoods, exists on two planes. Literally and figuratively. Literally the streets were raised, to escape the sloppy mess of the Chicago River's boglands, so that the second storey windows of Pilsen's homes fronted the raised causeways of the streets. The description of this setup in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle attests to the underworld it created, a dark, dank nightmarish space between earth and sun, where the dirt poor attempted to scratch their names in history's record, mostly in futility.

One of the first things I noticed about Pilsen when I arrived was that the roads and sidewalks cracked and buckled, and when I first walked down the ladder steep steps into a frontyard as a community organizer, I saw that the sagging concrete had nothing to rest on.

Figuratively, Pilsen's two planes are fa�ade and interior. The neighborhood is one of the city's most densely populated, shoulder to shoulder brick row houses of three stories built by Czechs. Bohemians. Now the New Bohemians have filtered back into a Mexican immigrant neighborhood, and some of them have created hidden oases invisible to the eye of poor immigrant and yuppie alike. Beth and Willy's garden is this way. I had walked by a thousand times before I was invited inside, and now I think without it there is no value to living in this place.

I am no master gardener. My real experience consists of most of one whole season on an organic farm, during which I awoke at 5am and worked the land until 7pm, conducting repetitive tasks like hoeing, raking, hand weeding, and transplanting. Farming and gardening are not the same. Farming, even boutique organic farming, is about scale. Thus, the idea is to make the ground as fertile as possible, to take away all the weeds, to rip out what is dead and transplant what is new. Gardening is spiritual, one person's attempt to learn from his/her plot. If gardening is like sailing a 20-ft sailboat alone, farming is like being in the navy. You swab the decks, run up the sails, go hard all day, take everything down again, and do it over the next day. Some grog at intervals helps out.

Willy has gardened his urban plot for over ten years now. When he started the soil was full of asphalt and glass and barren as any rocky abandoned lot in Pilsen. Now it is home to fruit trees, a raspberry patch, perennial and annual flower beds, a rose arbor, and fairly respectably sized vegetable garden that gets morning and afternoon sun. The first job I had in the garden was to clear the dead from the raspberry patch, and I did it with such gusto that I think it scared Willy. I tore everything dead out of there, tore a few green plants out in the process, so that the raspberry patch looked like a newly shorn sheep, sort of naked. Plants like this treatment early in the season, before they are flowering and fruiting, because it gives them room to grow and allows them to concentrate their energy on unfurling leaves, which feed them. But the gardener, in this case Willy, knows each plant like God's supposed to know the hairs on our head, and he remembers when the lot was a barren rocky trashbin and is loath to see anything killed, even in the name of life.

A few days later Willy and I transplanted some herbs, some snapdragons, some marigolds, and planted a row of radishes from seed. We turned up the earth together, planted together, and he let me water it all in, by far the most meditative and satisfying job in farming, and I guess gardening. Watering in is just what it sounds like, drenching your newly planted transplants in life-giving water, sinking them down, taking their roots out of shock, and it also signals the end of a job well-done. Watching water move is something I would like to do every day. Something I think we all should do everyday, even if it's in the tub or the sink.

Now I have the key to the garden, and I can come and go as I please. Carolyn and I turned the vegetable plot yesterday, and weeded the strawberry patch. Last night we barbecued flank steak in the front garden, took in the grog ration, and listened to the birds sing the evensong. Inside the garden, sunk down below the street, surround by green and growth, the world outside is totally locked out. There are no drunks, no gangsters, no car alarms, no machistas, no fights, no poverty, no racial hatred, no suspicion. There is only the quiet hum of the garden gearing up, taking advantage of water and sun to turn the turbine of life in every chloroplastic cell.

Right now I'm broke as the sidewalk out front of my house. No one is paying for my writing. It's time for me to get a J O B again, much as I swore on the mast of my small craft that I would never do it again. We are bound for New Orleans on Thursday, for a last bit of fun and some scouting. The writing is still stopped off inside me. But the plants sleep all winter, play dead, and then they explode. Usually after a few days of grey rain. When the sun comes back out.