Then I explained that Tom was actually the little boy on TV who
tended the garden with his brother. Jordan was not interested in helping
me grow my garden, due to his lifelong fear of marrows. So Muncho
and I took notes while watching Tom and his brother, and eventually
we had a little idea what we were supposed to do. One thing we
didn’t understand was why everyone kept talking about beds. I asked
Father why you would want to sleep in the garden, and he burst out
laughing. Eventually he agreed to help Muncho and I to create our little
vegetable patch, including beds. It was to be our own little corner of
Eden, a fruitful paradise of vegetable abundance. Muncho looked
forward to seeing a garden filled with so many carrots, but he got
scared when my father said he couldn’t wait to eat the juicy carrots
from my garden.
“Why are we going to eat the carrots?”
“Because that’s what they’re for, Muncho, why else would I want
to grow carrots in my garden?”
“But... but... they are just carrots, like me! Why would you want to
do that?!”
“Carrots on earth are different from magical carrots like you,
Muncho. You didn’t grow on a tree, you came from a special place far
away, like some kind of magical faraway tree, although for copyright
reasons, let’s call it space. There are other differences too. Earth
carrots are paler orange and slightly longer, whereas you can talk,
move, and breathe.”
That was the reassurance he needed. There wasn’t much Muncho
could do in the garden, so while Father and I worked he spent most of
his time playing in the mud and driving his imaginary tractor around. It
was a tractor in his imagination, not in mine. I couldn’t see the tractor
and asked whether perhaps it was a spirit guide tractor.
Muncho laughed and said, “What a preposterous idea!” In no time
we had completed work on the garden and we waited patiently for the
carrots to grow. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but after
months and months of waiting to harvest our delicious crop, nothing
happened.