Student sample for assessment
Written by a Year 6 student in Brunswick, Victoria, Australia.
Grandad's garden used to be the place to hide. Row after row of tomato plants so heavy with fruit they bent the stakes. Lettuce thick enough to lose yourself in. Zucchinis the size of cricket bats hidden under leaves. That's where it was when I was nine. I'm eleven now, and I hadn't been to visit in almost a year. When Mum pulled into the driveway, I noticed the fence first. Not the gate where Grandad grew jasmine. The fence was thin. You could see straight through the diamond gaps to next door. The jasmine was gone. Inside, Grandad was smaller. That was my first real thought. Not that he'd gotten older. That he'd gotten smaller, like water draining out. He smiled when he saw me, but the smile came from somewhere tired. 'The garden,' he said, and walked me round the back. The tomato stakes were there, but they had no plants. Just dirt. In the lettuce bed, a few sad leaves struggled in a patch of weeds. The zucchinis were gone. All of it was gone except the smell—that warm, turned-earth smell that meant Grandad. I didn't ask why. I could see why. His hands were bandaged. His walk was slower. The garden had taken more from him than it gave. 'I tried this spring,' he said. 'Got some plants in. But my back—' He shrugged. He didn't sound sad. He sounded like someone accepting the truth. I thought he would ask me to help. To fix it. But he just stood there, looking at the soil. And I understood that I couldn't fix it. That maybe the point was never the vegetables. The point was him, doing it. And now he couldn't. And that was a kind of loss he couldn't dig out of. 'Maybe next spring,' I said. He squeezed my shoulder. 'Maybe,' he said. But we both knew next spring wouldn't bring back what was gone.