After more than three years, my garden became quite flowery, grassy and leafy. However, I still had a little regret: It had never succeeded in producing a single fruit.
Actually I had tried to grow papaya trees in the beginning. But when Mum came to the house, she found them ugly and not fruiting. So we uprooted them together. I had also spent RM50 to buy two small fruit trees of rare species. But due to my lack of knowledge and experience, I did not manage to keep them alive for too long. Finally, I gave up my dream to harvest any fruits in my garden.
Early this year, I noticed an unusual plant appearing from the ground. When Mum saw it, she recognized that its leaves belonged to a sugar-apple tree. That was a fruit of my childhood! We used to keep the round, lumpy fruits inside a rice container until they ripened. Then we would eat the slippery, very sweet and soft light yellow flesh which tasted like custard. I wondered who had sown the seed because I had not eaten sugar-apples for years. Mum guessed it must have been from a bird.
As time passed, I paid less attention to the tree and spent less time in the garden. I expected God to bring rain often to Paya Rumput so that I did not have to walk many rounds with the sprinkler to water the plants. While I fed myself nutritious food, I forgot that my plants also needed fertilizer to grow better.
There was also another thin papaya tree growing by itself. It did not survive after a couple of months. So the sugar-apple tree which had grown taller than I finally turned out winner. And for the first times since I moved into this house, I tasted a fruit from my own garden. It was worth more than any other fruits from the markets.
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