She is five foot four hunched over, with thick silver hair and meaty forearms. Her name is Ulya Zubarevich and she is the sidewalk farmer of New York City. The island of Manhattan has been in bloom since Ulya’s arrival almost twenty years ago. Few patches of soil are left without something sprouting out of them - spring onions, bell peppers, snap peas. All were planted by the freckled, wrinkling hands of Ulya, sternly but lovingly. Ulya is forty-five, though she looks much older. Few have ever heard her speak, but when she does, it is with a thick accent. She wears faded clothes held together by decades of repairs and usually has black crescents of fresh soil under her fingernails. 

Ulya was born in the small village of Ptich, Belarus. She was a farmer since she learned how to walk. By the time she was eight Ulya already looked like somebody’s miniature grandmother, mixing horse manure into soil with her little fingers. Her Mama died giving birth to her little sister, Fyokla, and their father started drinking soon after. Ulya was twenty-four when Fyokla announced she would be moving to America. “I’m going to New York City,” she said, “To marry a rich man. Like Donald Trump.” Ulya thought it to be a nonsensical idea, impractical and idiotic. A month later, they were quietly packing their suitcases as their father slept in his regular Wednesday night stupor.

They moved into a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side. Ulya lives in that apartment to this day, though she is alone now. Fyokla is gone. Only her belongings remain - her moth-eaten clothes still take up half of the closet and pink slippers poke out from under the bed. Ulya works at a massage parlor by day, where she kneads the hairy, spotted backs of strangers. She is the only woman who takes male clients - she is stronger than the male masseuses and does not get asked for special favors. It has only ever happened twice, and both times Ulya stared silently at the offenders until they changed their minds. 

Every day, before and after work, Ulya walks familiar paths to tend to all the little life she has sowed. There is always work to do - fertilizing, planting, watering. In Ulya’s head is a precise map of Manhattan complete with every one of her bushes, her seedlings. The work is hard but she gets to walk down her streets like they are her grocery isles, plucking ripe produce on her way. Sometimes Ulya finds her fruits and vegetables already harvested, the bushes left green and bald. Ulya likes to picture the opportunists eating her bell peppers like apples or sucking the sweet juice from her cherry tomatoes. She feels an inexplicable fondness towards them, her little thieves. The made-up strangers in her head always look a little bit like Fyokla, and they are always grateful and happy, even though they are New Yorkers.