Pender submits another blog entry:

13th July 2011
LIVE [By Guestblogger: Sarah, IN]

[Note: Sarah is an inmate in Indianapolis Women’s Prison currently serving a life sentence for murder. I have been writing to her for over two years. After having escaped from prison eight years into her sentence, she was on the lam for nearly a year. She was profiled on America’s Most Wanted and caught. Since then she has been in solitary confinement for the last two and a half years. A book about Sarah’s life and escape came out this month called Girl, Wanted: The Chase for Sarah Pender.]


Pender’s Peace Garden

Living in solitary confinement gives mea renewed sense of appreciation for life. Two and a half years of good behavior has earned me the privilege of gardening the rocks. Fives days each week, I am handcuffed through a hole in the door, led from my cell to a plastic patio chair in which I must kneel to allow an officer to lock shackles around my ankles. Between the steel leg clamps hangs a heavy chain that grants me freedom in sixteen inch increments.

My garden is a sea of peagravel that pools around a concrete pad onto which are bolted several large chain-link fence cages that resemble dog runs. In fair weather we hostages are released from our cells into these cages, one woman per cage, for our one hour of “recreation” where we can sit and soak up sunshine, or “exercise”, which creepily resembles restless circus tigers or feral dogs pacing. The cages are flanked on three sides by brick walls with a razor wire topped fence at the end—a place so desolate, abandoned houses have more pizazz.

A forest of weeds grows up from the peddles, and I shuffle around caring for them as if they are my surrogate children, sculpting clover into miniature bushes, adopting tiny flowering outcasts, and deimating the intruding crabgrass. I became attached to a sticker plant that grew over 18 inches before a rainstorm tilted him like a corner bar drunk. As I tended to him, the girls teased me that I was raising weeds.

I chided them. “He is a plant. Stop calling him a weed. You are hurting his feelings.” I then assured all of my little guys that I would protect them from other bullies, validated their right to exist and be cared for, and showered them with watery love.

A bucket is the only garden tool I am permitted besides plastic bags and gloves for picking out unwanted intruders, so when the Superintendent approved for Minister Bruce to bring in a few potted plants, there was a discourse about how I would garden real plants without tools. I told them I didn’t need any tools.

“How will you garden without tools?”

“I will figure it out,” I confidently replied.

I sketched out a plan to place my five flowers (rudbeckia, shasta daisy, marigold, impatient and begonia) and then started digging. I snapped two cheap wooden pencils before I discovered an indestructible weapon for micro earth moving: a used Colgate toothbrush. An old coffee-stained tumbler became my itty-bitty backhoe, and together we made a hole appear. It is a slow process, but it is not like I’m pressed for time.

To even get down to the dirt requires a recipe of equal parts creativity, ingenuity, and brute force. First, I bulldozed the peagravel with a dustpan borrowed from the janitor’s closet. Underneath is a sheet of black fabric that, ironically is supposed to suppress weed growth, but only serves to annoy me. I don’t know, maybe it keeps the dirt warm and cozy on cold nights.

The fabric lays in long swaths about 20 ft X 3 ft. Moving sixty square feet of gravel in order to dig an eight inch square hold is absurd even by my standards. It crosses the threshold between hard work and masochism. Without the benefit of scissors and having the upper body strength of a ten year old, I had to rely on some old school postage stamp technology: perforation. (Anyone under 30 probably has no idea that stamps came any other was besides in sheets of stickers. After all, this is the generation of peel-n-stick envelopes.) Again, with my trusty toothbrush I wildly stab the earth like Anthony Perkins, slightly disturbing my caged associates.

“Do not be afraid! This is only a test,” I assure them as I finish a row of surprisingly neat dotted lines. After wrestling the winter carpet like an MMA fighter, I emerge victorious, holding up my tattered square trophy with dirt-covered hands.

A week later, the flowers were in the ground and still alive.

The prison donated dirt, trays and some seeds, so I built tiny greenhouses out of old shampoo bottles and clear trash bags, poking vents in them with Mr. Toothbrush. Once they grow a good root system, I ask the officer to save the breakfast milk cartons, and with the help of my handy-dandy toothbrush, I transform them into miniature transplanting pots.

Only of of three seed types has germinated, so I am banking on these to grow up big and strong to create Pender’s Peace Garden, a tropical oasis of serenity. However, even if my incubators fail to hatch new babies, just the few existing plants already positively impact the environment. In a world of concrete and steel, rock and brick, emerges delicate life in tiny bursts of orange, green, yellow, pink and white.

A young woman, 21, here for armed robbery and a littany of priors, thanked me for planting the daisies between the cell window and cage. “They make this place seem more human.” Her words brought me into stark reality over treatment: we are locked in a bathroom 23 hours a day, put inside a cage to shower, instead of muzzles we wear handcuffs, and when out to play are kept on a very short leash.

And she was right; by validating the plants’ inherent value, they, in turn, validate our humanity.