About George, the garden gnome

George looked from under his yellow, pointy hat at the expanse of green on which he had been placed.

‘This is one big garden!’ he mutter to himself while trying to see if there are other creatures or ornaments he could hang about with.

To his surprise though, the well manicured garden seemed completely empty. Even the handful of plants were extremely trimmed and seemed very well behaved.

‘Ok, this looks good! Not bad at all, if I say so myself!’, George the garden gnome congratulated himself.

To be fair, gnome life is very unpredictable. You never know where you will end up. They build you, they paint you in pretty colors and then, they ship you in the big, wide containers to wherever people with gardens live.

In a huge garden store, George had been waiting patiently for ages to be picked up and taken somewhere, but for a reason or another he was never exactly just right.

He had heard the people looking at him saying:

‘He is too small!’

‘His hat is yellow!’

‘He does not look cute!’

‘You cannot see his eyes!’

‘No, he is not right!’

And as nobody picked him up and valued him, George understood that all those things they were saying about him were bad things, and as there were so many bad things about him, most likely he was bad too, and, for sure, if he ever landed in a garden it would be a bad one.

‘This is not bad, not bad at all!’, but, inside, George was convinced that the bad was about to follow. There was no other way for such a bad gnome as himself!

Then, when a big, unusually fluffy cat appeared in the garden, George was sure the bad are about to start.

The cat looked at him briefly with intense green eyes, and then, impassible, walked on seeming not to care in the least that there had appeared a gnome in the garden.

George was baffled as his expectations of the evil cat were thwarted. ‘Whaaaa …?’

Then, when night descended as a dark, gauze veil, engulfing the garden, George shivered with fright, as he was sure the bad that he deserved was about to unleash itself over the garden.

The clocks ticked slowly along and slugs showed up in the garden, going about their relaxed business of munching plants and gossiping with each other. They said hello to the frightened gnome and followed their path.

When George saw a huge, spiky monster crossing the garden, he was sure that his end had come. The monster though passed him by, while saying hello in a squeaky voice and uncovering a pink face from under the scary spikes.

The nigh was chilly, but George was enjoying it and was fascinated by the unbelievable world living in darkness.

As the dawn came a huge racket was spun from the trees surrounding the garden by the lot of birds that had been sleeping throughout the night.

‘This is it! The end!’

But it wasn’t. In the golden dawn the birds of different sizes landed in the garden looking for food, chatting loudly, and generally being everywhere at all times making a racket and being bothersome.

No bad things happened to George that day either, or the next, or the next. And George started to forget that he was bad and that he was meant to have bad things happen to him. George got used to his new life and even started to enjoy the noisiness of the birds.

George still believed in his core that he is not worthy of a good life, but he accepted it gladly, and slowly, he learnt how to accept that good things happen to him too. Moreover, one of the nosy blackbirds had taken a shine to George and would spend countless hours with him noisily sharing all the gossip from the neighborhood.

Although George was afraid to admit it even to himself, so as not to jinx it, life turned out much better than he ever though a bad gnome would deserve.