Chapter 1

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DEDICATION For every child who has ever looked over a fence and wondered who was on the other side.

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There was a tall wooden fence between Aiden's house and the house next door.

Aiden had never seen over the fence. He was only seven, and the fence was about a hundred feet tall. Well, maybe six feet. But when you're seven, six feet is basically a hundred.

He knew someone lived on the other side because he could hear them. In the mornings, he heard music — strange, beautiful music that he couldn't identify. In the afternoons, he heard someone humming. And once, late on a Saturday, he heard a voice say something in a language he didn't understand.

"Who lives next door?" Aiden asked his dad.

"A new family. They moved in last month. The Nazaris, I think."

"Where are they from?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe Iran?"

"What's Iran?"

"It's a country far away. Near where your mother's people came from, actually — Iraq is right next door to Iran."

This was interesting to Aiden. His mother was Iraqi-American, and she sometimes spoke Arabic on the phone with her sisters. He knew a few Arabic words — salam meant hello, shukran meant thank you, habibi meant someone you loved.

"Do they speak Arabic in Iran?"

"No, they speak Farsi. It's different but a little similar."

"Should we say hello?"

His dad paused. "We should. We definitely should. I'll bake something."

Aiden's dad baked banana bread, because banana bread was his answer to every social situation. Birthdays, funerals, new neighbors — banana bread.

They walked to the Nazaris' front door and knocked. A woman answered — kind face, dark eyes, a warm smile.

"Hello! I'm David, and this is Aiden. We're your neighbors."

"Oh, hello! I am Nasrin. Please, come in!"

The house smelled amazing — like spices and flowers and something sweet baking in the oven. A man appeared — "I am Farshad, hello!" — and then a girl, about Aiden's age, with black hair and enormous dark eyes.

"This is Shirin," Nasrin said. "She is seven."

Aiden and Shirin looked at each other. Neither said anything. Shirin's English was new and uncertain, and Aiden didn't know any Farsi, so they just stood there, two seven-year-olds separated by a language gap, until Shirin pointed to the banana bread and said, "Bread?"

"Banana bread," Aiden said.

"Ba-na-na," Shirin repeated carefully. Then she smiled. "I like banana."

"Me too," said Aiden.

And that was the beginning.

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"My father loves that tree," Shirin told Aiden, her English improving every day. "He brought the — how you say — seeds? From Iran. It is from our old garden."

Aiden's family didn't have a garden. They had a bare patch of dirt along the fence where his mother sometimes talked about planting something but never did.

"You could grow things," Shirin said, looking at the bare patch. "The sun is good here."

"I don't know how."

"I teach you. My family always grow garden. Always."

So Shirin taught Aiden to garden. She showed him how to test the soil — "Squeeze it. If it sticks, too much clay. If it falls apart, too much sand." She showed him how to plant seeds at the right depth — "Small seeds, shallow hole. Big seeds, deep hole." She showed him how to water gently, like rain, not like a fire hose.

They started small. Aiden planted marigolds, because Shirin said they were easy and happy. Shirin gave him basil seeds from her family's garden — Persian basil, she said, which was different from the basil at the grocery store.

The seeds went into the dirt on both sides of the fence. Aiden's marigolds on one side. Shirin's basil on the other. A garden between, separated by wood but connected by intention.

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One afternoon, Aiden noticed something growing through the fence.

A green vine had poked through a gap between two boards, stretching from Shirin's side to his. It was thin and curling, reaching toward the sunlight in Aiden's yard.

"That's my cucumber," Shirin said from the other side. "It is growing through!"

"Should we push it back?"

"No! Let it grow. A cucumber does not care about fences."

This struck Aiden as very wise. The cucumber vine kept growing, threading through the gap, and within two weeks it had produced a small green cucumber that hung on Aiden's side of the fence but belonged to Shirin's plant.

"Whose cucumber is it?" Aiden asked.

"It is the garden's cucumber," Shirin said. "We share."

They split the cucumber at lunch. It was the most delicious cucumber Aiden had ever eaten, possibly because it tasted like teamwork.

The cucumber vine inspired them. If a plant could grow through the fence, what else could? They started planting things deliberately on both sides of the gap — Aiden pushed sunflower seeds through from his side, and Shirin tucked morning glory seeds through from hers. The fence became a border that plants ignored, growing through and over and around it as if it weren't there.

"Plants are smarter than people," Shirin observed. "They do not see fences."

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As the garden grew, so did their language.

Shirin taught Aiden Persian words for everything they planted. Gol meant flower. Sabzi meant herb. Derakht meant tree. Aiden taught Shirin English words she didn't know — sunflower, fertilizer, weed, sprinkler.

"Your garden has two voices," Aiden's mother said, looking at the bilingual labels with tears in her eyes. She added a third voice — Arabic names for the plants she recognized from her mother's garden in Baghdad. Now the labels had three languages.

Nasrin, Shirin's mother, heard about this and added a fourth — the scientific Latin names, because she had been a botanist in Iran.

The garden between the fence had become, without anyone planning it, a living language project — every plant speaking four tongues, every label a tiny lesson in how many ways there were to name the same beautiful thing.

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Aiden's parents decided to throw a block party. They hadn't done one in years, because — Aiden's dad admitted — they didn't know their neighbors very well.

"That's embarrassing," his dad said. "We've lived here five years and I couldn't name half the people on this street."

The block party changed that. Aiden and Shirin went door to door with invitations. They met the Johnsons (retired couple, excellent pie bakers). The Garcias (four kids, very loud, very fun). The Nguyens (quiet family, but Mrs. Nguyen made spring rolls that could make you weep with joy). Old Mr. Harrison, who lived alone with a parrot named Shakespeare.

Everyone brought food. Aiden's dad brought banana bread. Shirin's family brought Persian rice with saffron and kabobs. The Garcias brought tamales. The Nguyens brought spring rolls. Mr. Harrison brought store-bought cookies, which was fine because he was eighty-seven and nobody expected him to bake.

They set up tables in the street. Kids rode bikes. Adults talked. Somebody brought a guitar. Shakespeare the parrot said "To be or not to be!" from Mr. Harrison's front porch, and everyone applauded.

Aiden and Shirin gave garden tours. They showed everyone the plants growing through the fence, the bilingual labels, the shared cucumber vine. Mrs. Johnson said it was the sweetest thing she'd ever seen. Mr. Garcia said it reminded him of his grandmother's garden in Mexico. Mrs. Nguyen said she had seeds from Vietnam she'd been saving for twenty years, waiting for the right garden to plant them in.

"Plant them here," Shirin said. "Our garden has room."

By the end of the party, six families had promised seeds. The garden between the fence was about to become the garden of the whole block.

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August brought a thunderstorm that was the worst in thirty years.

Wind howled. Rain lashed. Lightning cracked the sky. And in the morning, when Aiden ran outside, the garden was destroyed.

The wind had ripped the trellis off the fence. The rain had flooded the raised beds and washed away the topsoil. The sunflowers were broken. The fig tree had lost a major branch. And the fence itself — the tall wooden fence between the yards — had been blown down entirely.

Aiden stood in the wreckage and felt a lump in his throat. All their work. All those plants and labels and seeds and care. Gone in one night.

Shirin appeared beside him. She looked at the ruined garden and the fallen fence and was quiet for a long time. Then she said, "The roots are still there."

"What?"

"The roots. Under the ground. The storm killed the parts you can see. But the roots are still alive. If we replant, they will grow back."

"How do you know?"

"Because my grandmother told me. In Iran, we had a garden, and there was a bad frost one year that killed everything. My grandmother said, 'The roots remember.' She replanted, and the garden came back stronger."

"The roots remember," Aiden repeated.

They started cleaning up. And they weren't alone. Mr. Garcia showed up with a wheelbarrow. Mrs. Johnson brought a rake. The Nguyens brought tarps. Mr. Harrison directed operations from a lawn chair, with Shakespeare providing commentary.

By Saturday, the garden was cleared and ready for replanting. But something had changed. The fence was down, and nobody seemed in a hurry to put it back up.

"Do we need the fence?" Aiden's dad asked Farshad.

Farshad looked at the open space between their yards — one continuous garden, no barrier, the plants on both sides reaching toward each other.

"I think," Farshad said slowly, "the garden has decided."

They left the fence down. The two yards became one garden. And the garden, as Shirin had promised, grew back stronger.

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By October, the garden was bursting.

Tomatoes hung heavy on the vine — Shirin's Persian variety and Aiden's cherry tomatoes growing side by side. Mrs. Nguyen's Vietnamese herbs had spread in a green carpet along the sunny edge. Mr. Garcia's chili peppers glowed red and orange. Even old Mr. Harrison had contributed a pot of lavender, because "Shakespeare likes the smell."

They held a harvest party. Every family on the block came. They picked tomatoes and cucumbers and peppers and herbs, filling baskets and bowls and bags. Nasrin made a huge pot of ash reshteh — a traditional Persian soup — using ingredients from the garden. Mrs. Garcia made salsa from the peppers. Mrs. Nguyen made a salad with herbs that perfumed the entire street.

They ate together, all of them, sitting in the fence-less garden on blankets and lawn chairs, passing dishes back and forth, tasting each other's food, learning each other's words for "delicious" — mazeh mideh (Farsi), riquísimo (Spanish), ngon (Vietnamese), oishii (Mrs. Kim from two blocks over had joined them, bringing Japanese pickled vegetables).

Aiden sat between Shirin and Mr. Harrison's lawn chair and looked at the garden. Four months ago, this had been two separate yards divided by a fence. Now it was one garden shared by a dozen families, planted in seeds from six countries, labeled in four languages, fed by a storm that had destroyed everything and made everything better.

"Shirin?" he said.

"Yes?"

"Your grandmother was right. The roots remember."

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On the last warm day of autumn, Aiden and Shirin made a seed box.

They collected seeds from every plant in the garden — carefully dried and stored in small paper envelopes, each one labeled in English, Farsi, Arabic, and Latin. They put the envelopes in a wooden box that Aiden's dad built and Shirin's mother painted with flowers.

"THE SEED BOX — Take a seed, leave a seed. Every garden starts with sharing."

Within a week, the seed box was full. People Aiden had never met stopped by to take marigold seeds or leave packets of wildflower mix. A woman from three streets over brought seeds from her grandmother's garden in Ethiopia. A man from the apartment complex brought seeds he'd ordered from a catalog — varieties from Poland, where his family was from.

The fence was gone. The garden was everywhere. And the seeds kept traveling.

Aiden looked at the box — stuffed with little envelopes from a dozen countries, labeled in languages he couldn't all read, carrying the promise of flowers and vegetables and herbs and trees that hadn't been planted yet but would be, someday, by someone.

"You know what, Shirin?" he said.

"What?"

"I think the garden is bigger than the garden."

Shirin smiled. She understood. The garden between the fence had never really been about plants. It was about what happens when you take something growing and share it with someone on the other side of whatever wall is between you.

The wall comes down. The garden grows. And the roots — always the roots — remember.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Crimson Ark Publishing publishes fiction for readers of all ages, drawing on the spiritual principles and rich cultural heritage of the Bahá'í Faith. Our stories explore themes of unity, justice, courage, and the transformative power of love — through characters and communities that reflect the beautiful diversity of the human family. Every book is an invitation to see the world not only as it is, but as it could be.

Visit us at crimsonarkpublishing.com