The Shoe-box

        After my grandfather died, I took his most prized possession - the last fragment of family I had left - and planted it in the garden outside my apartment building.  It was an old brown shoe-box, corners wrinkled from years of fighting gravity, fingerprints eroded into the weak cardboard from endless hours of his cradling.  It was the trophy that sat proudly in the center of his fireplace mantle.  
        Once, when I was eight years old, I asked him about it.
        "Grandpa," I said, "what's in that old box?"
        A sly grin crawled across his old face, and he lifted the shoe-box off the mantle and sat it on his lap.  "Well, now, in this box I keep the seeds of the world's most beautiful things."  He said this, stroking the lid gingerly, and winked at me.
        So when he passed into that Good Night, I took his box of seeds and planted it.
                        *     *     *
        It rained that evening and all through the night, keeping me up with stiff raindrops rapping at my window in sheets.  When I woke up it had stopped, and by lunch the sun had broken through the clouds and dried the tall grass, so I decided to go check on the spot where I buried the box.  
        When I arrived at the damp, tapped down soil, I noticed something in the center of the plot.  Kneeling down, I could see a shoot, not half-an-inch high, sticking bravely out of the wet dirt.  Seeing the healthy sapling, I went to find a plant tag, wrote 'Beauty' on the back, and stuck it in the ground beside the buried box.
                        *    *    *
        I used to wonder why my grandfather never planted the box himself.  In his backyard he kept a small garden, vegetables mostly, though often overgrown with weeds.  There was plenty of room for the box, but he preferred to keep it on the mantle, always just a loving gaze away.
        "Ya know, Grandpa," I said once while helping him move furniture in his cozy living room. "If you plant the seeds of beautiful things, beautiful things will grow.  What's the point of just keeping the seeds?"
        With this, he sat down in his blue chair, now turned to face the mantle, and took a sip from his tea.  "I don't need to see them grow," he said, smiling through the wrinkles on his face, his eyes twinkling and focused on the box.  "I can feel the beauty through the walls of the box."
                        *    *    *
        Within four days of planting it, the sapling had grown nearly a full foot high, had the diameter of a penny and healthy arms reaching out from the trunk.  Each day more and more jealous plants encroached upon the plot of the Beauty I so tenderly cared for; and each day I faithfully tore them from the dirt by the fistful and dragged them to the compost pile.  I left my empty apartment early in the afternoons to tend to the plant, and found myself arriving home later and later as it grew taller and stronger.
        "Whatcha growin' there, young man?" a sweet voice chirped one day while I was weeding.  It was Mrs. Baker, a mid-fifties housewife who lived in my building with her husband.  I stood up, brushed the dirt off my knees, and turned to smile at her.  Before I could squeeze out a word, she chimed in again.
        "You looked hot working out here, so I brought you a little something to drink," she said, and handed me a tall glass of cool lemonade.  I thanked her and sipped the sweet drink, and she leaned over to inspect the garden marker.  
        " 'Beauty', huh?" she asked, and smiled warmly.
        "Yes'm," I replied, "courtesy of my late Grandfather."
        "Ah yes, God rest his Soul.  He was a traveler, wasn't he?"
        My grandfather used to save every penny he could for trips to far away places.  He had been to most corners of the globe by the time he passed away.  For the first few years after my parents died, he would take me with him, showing me museums and palaces, deserts and jungles, incredibly beautiful things from all around the world.  And everywhere we went, he had his old shoe-box close at hand.
                        *    *    *
        The plant kept growing.  After two weeks, it was nearly two meters tall, and as wide around as a telephone pole.  The weeds around it grew thick and fast, flowers of all kinds trying to bring down the colossal plant.  Gradually, more people from the apartment building became interested, and came down to help tend to the Beauty.  Mrs. Baker provided the lemonade for all of us, often making three trips up and down the stairs to deliver each fresh batch.
        As the plant grew taller, it sprang off more thick branches with dark leaves.  Soon, these branches grabbed the wall of our apartment building, crawling up the drainpipes and into the windows.  Before long the whole building was covered, and all occupants abandoned their living spaces for the lawn, sleeping and tending the plant in shifts.  Children played in the dirt and grass as parents toiled and tended the plant together.  
        The weeds began to grow as fast as we could pull them; Roses, Daffodils, Lilies, Orchids, and Sunflowers grew tight around the plant's base, and we ripped them out at the roots; vines crawled up the thick stem, and we pulled them down as fast as they could grow.  The compost pile grew to take up most of the building's backyard, and a whole new set of weeds took root in the rich new soil.
                        *    *    *
        "What the heck kinda seeds you plant here, anyways?" someone asked, pulling out a merciless group of Violets.
        "Well," I said, smiling, "they aren't your everyday type of seeds, that's for sure."
        I thought back to just after my grandfather's funeral.  I was in my empty apartment, still wearing my black suit, the shoe-box sitting in front of me on the table.  In all the years my grandfather told me about that box, he never once opened it to show me its contents.  Feeling suddenly curious, I reached over, pulled the old box carefully towards me and slowly lifted the top off.  A small cloud of dust plumed from inside the box, and settled neatly on the tablecloth.  Leaning towards the rotting cardboard frame, I averted my eyes for a second, sighed, then peered cautiously inside.
        At the bottom of the box was a thick layer of what appeared to be years of dust and decomposed paper.  Furrowing my brow, I brushed the contents around with one finger, feeling the old materials clinging to the waves of my fingerprint.  Looking up, I noticed an envelope taped to the underside of the box lid.  I opened the envelope carefully, pulled out the letter and began to read my grandfather's scratchy handwriting:
        In this box you will find the seeds of the most beautiful things this world has ever seen.
        He then goes on to list its contents by name.  Paint chips from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  A vial of water from the reflecting pool outside the Taj Mahal.  A corner of the Mona Lisa.  Rock dust from the Venus de Milo.  A piece of the sheet music for Fur Elise.  Sand from the base of the Great Pyramid.  These relic fragments and dozens more decomposing together in a box on my grandfather's mantle for years and years.
        I looked once more at the ash, then closed the box.  The next day, I planted it.
                        *    *    *
        The weeds began to slow their growing, and soon the flower showed signs of blooming.  
        On the day the large flower bud opened, the whole town had gathered around the huge plant.  Covered in dirt and sweat, we looked up and watch the petals slowly separate, and then open wider and wider, until finally it was spread out full, soaking in the late afternoon sun.  We were all smiling and laughing in the presence of Beauty.  Mrs. Baker approached me, and put her arm around my shoulder, as a mother would a child, and together we gazed on the majestic flower.
        "It's magnificent," she whispered.
        I looked around me at the townspeople together, sharing this moment together as a family would.
        "Yes'm," I said, and smiled.  "It sure is somethin' else."