Maggots And Rice

I went for a walk today, like I normally do. Today as I walked down Salter Street I passed something on the sidewalk. It looked like rice, or maybe it was a pile of maggots. I am not really sure. Like most thing that I see in the North End, I do not stop and examine it too closely to see what it really is. And the mess on the sidewalk was just that, a mess on the sidewalk. It doesn't much matter if it was maggots or rice, I walked around it and kept on going.
As I moved down the street, I came across the community garden. The snow has mostly melted away. So, I decided to go into the yard and have a look at the garden boxes. I could see remnants of last years crops, along with garden tags indicating where the various flowers and vegetable plants once resided. As I walked slowly through the yard, a confrontation was beginning between a few people close by. I took that as an invitation to leave.
Nobody wants to hang around where an issue may occur. And nobody wants to be a witness to the fall-out.
On I went, down the lane behind the community garden, in a direction away from the shouts.
It's hard to tell, without closer inspection, who those people really were. They could be maggots, or they could just be rice.