The Quiet Man

His garden always looked unruly. He seemed to have an uncanny way of making green things grow; but they often grew too fast for him to keep up with. The neighbors would look at his little house and gape at the runners curling up the posts of his porch and fingering their way across the roof, or the bushes that had turned to little trees overnight. He was a quiet man, known only to his neighbors as 'that funny little man who lived in the small house at the end of the street.' It was a little curious that he was never known for his forest of a yard which would grow and grow until he came out and tended it every other Tuesday. But nobody ever mentioned his yard or his plants. Instead they gaped quietly, silently and to themselves, as though afraid to break the spell of ordinary life and admit that there was something magical, at least off, about the man who lived near the dead end of their quiet little dead end street.

He was a polite man; he put up his hand, palm out, in a show of a wave whenever a neighbor happened to venture past. The only neighbors who ever did pass were a group of local kids on their bikes, making their way to the little path through the trees at the end of the street, or the elderly couple who would stroll to the end of the pavement, turn under the canopy of the gum leaves, and stroll back towards their home at the beginning of the street. But somehow everyone seemed to know, however privately and often without actually admitting it to themselves, that the funny little man who lived in the small house at the end of the street had a way with making green things grow. And this, perhaps, kept them from passing any judgment on him or the strangeness that seemed to surround him.
-Pliny the Dreamer