My Orange Friend

People pick up tomatoes from me every day. Seeing all the people pass through the fences, each day is very boring. Being sprayed from pesticides and insecticides and hearing people shout and fight, that’s it! Other friends of mine in that small place also share their thoughts about how they like sitting in a small, old garden. Seeing the sunset regularly is an opportunity many people don’t get. But, me and my friends have got bored seeing the sun going away. Our owners disturb our sleep by spraying water on us early in the morning. The kids in that house trouble us by plucking leaves and stems. And I don’t think they know that we also have feelings. And then, pitch dark. Strong wind blows and we say to each other, good night.

But the next day, I saw a new friend sitting right beside me.

“Hello, are you new in this garden, what’s your name?” I asked him. He was pretty small, looked like he was a seedling.

He yawned. I seemed to have disturbed his sleep.

“Oh, hello, who are you all?” he talked in a feeble voice.

I felt strange. Whenever I was awake, I had the blazing sun facing towards me. It turned out that it wasn’t morning yet.

“Hi, sorry to wake you up so early, I was asking if you were new in this garden?”

“Yes, I think so, I guess I was sleeping when I was brought here from the nursery. But this place is a lot worse than my childhood home.”

“Oh, you spent your childhood in the nursery, well then perhaps you could sing the alphabet song like those mischievous kids in the house?”

“I am still a child, I am only 3 weeks old if I have counted correctly,” he said.

“That was just a joke, okay? And why are you so small and where have you come from?!” I exclaimed.

He stayed calm, “I first was in a jungle where I had my mom standing beside me all day long. It was a very nice place. Then, after a week, when I was as big as a weed, I had come to a place called a nursery. It was a very bad place. I stayed there for a long time until I… Ouch! What was that?!”

“Bee Express. These are pesticides and insecticides. I call them Bee Express as they sting a lot.” I answered.

“Okay whatever, I was saying that I stayed there for a long time until I came here,” he said. “It was always much nicer in the other two places.”

We became friends in a couple of days. All my other friends also got familiar to the baby plant. In a matter of time, he grew up and turned out be an orange plant. We all called him orange. He was very talkative. He was very funny and soon the days that used to be boring before became very enjoyable. My friends and me could never be as creative as him.

Days passed and our surroundings kept changing. Some of my friends dried out and some grew up to trees. Apple was taken away after he was as much as fifteen feet tall according to me. Mr. Fern dried out. He was the eldest plant in the garden. Soon, I was also shifted to another garden. It was much bigger and the soil was more fertile and comfortable there. But I liked my old house much more. The friends were very nice there. Here, the whole place was almost empty. I felt very lonely without any friends.

A whole year had passed by. I was again shifted. This time to a public garden. After a few days, I heard a voice. A familiar one. I looked around to see if it was one of my friends. And, surprisingly, it was Orange! I was very confused I didn’t quite recognize him at once. Now I had a very nice friend sitting right beside me. In a few days, the garden felt like my old house. I had made a lot of friends there. But one day, I saw that Orange was missing. I looked around with my friends but we couldn’t see him. Days passed by; he still didn’t show up. We all got very sad and stopped talking to each other. It got very quiet without Orange. He was the only one who used to bring joy to us and now he was gone. Neither the sun shiny rays nor the moon’s beautiful, creamy colour cheered me up. All my friends were also very quiet. Whatever jokes they made, I always felt very lonely. The garden was nothing but a graveyard for me without Orange.

And one day, we saw a small plant right beside us. He was as small as Orange when we first met him. Also, he looked exactly like the baby Orange who first showed up in the garden.

“My father told me that you were his best friend,” he said to me in a feeble voice.