During the past season, the White family has been a regular weekend fixture at our house. The sound of cheers from a poker win and the rattle of the porcelain pieces clattering together with the smell of steamed lobster and minced garlic ubiquitous throughout our house. They're a perfect fit: the husband doesn't drink and reeks of corporate life and Chantal, his wife, is a big drinker. An almost mirror image of everything my mom tells me not to become.

My aunt loves to outdo herself as a host. I'm the same too. Always getting up to make sure everyone's drink is full, driving the conversation along, being too loud and outrageous. So it was only a matter of time before we were invited to the White residence. The house was slightly smaller but it was the backyard that drew my roots in.

Our backyard looks more like a junkyard of failed gardening. A tree there, weeds everywhere, and random brown spots littering the lawn. The White's backyard however looks like a rainforest, entire stocks of lettuces and tomatoes doused with the incense of dill and pepermint. There is an art to growing life, a certain talent involving attention and tenderness. My own experiences are limited to one sapling to tree I got for free at some long lost elementary school field trip that's drifted out of memory.

I placed it on the window sill that collected morning and afternoon light, I watered it with care everyday. A sapling did grow, this tiny thread of green growing out of dirt. Life. But it died. I watered it and made sure it got enough light, and it died. The box had an image of a happy prepubescent boy digging a hole for a burgeoning tree under a lush spring afternoon, and here I was near tears with a wilting brown sprout.

My aunt's luck with plant life has been more or less the same. A failed attempt at a front lawn garden bordered by stolen bricks from a construction site, her trial of lowering her blood pressure by experimenting on a backyard garden failed because it was too near the neighbours garden where competing roots copped all the water or the hill on the northwest corner where water slipped freely downward. She tried her best, did what she thought would work. But it didn't and now we're left these patches of small successes and glaring failures.

Mr. White takes special care when describing his techniques. The special soils needed and the many different watering schedules for each plant. Though he'd never admit it, it's his spices that he's most proud of. He tells me, it's especially easy. An innate skill within all of us, though really I think he's being humble or patronizing in that passive aggressive way. He brushes the tall stalks of lettuce as he begins picking the cherry tomatoes for the oncoming dinner. Afterwards he describes the nature of gardening in a pseudo-Shinto fashion.

By the next weekend, he offers to plant some mint for us. He scales our backyard and carresses the soil for moisture, for potential planting grounds. As we walk back into our house through the backdoor, he takes one last look at our backyard; shaking his head in silent disapproval. I try to read his face: is it the neglect? The half-measure efforts? Those times we really tried until it either got too hard, lost interest, or simply became too much work.

But still we try, this odd fusion of want and need. We'll fail because of our ignorance or our vices but still we try. And we'll concentrate on it because it's there and it depends on us. But life gets in the way of life.