Run Sheet
00.06.29
In search of my mother's garden
All of the gardens I knew when I grew up were tended by my mother.
Every year my father insisted that we have a garden and would rent a rototiller and churn the rocky, blue clay soil. There would end his contribution.
Along with the cooking, cleaning and caring for a family of six, my mother was then given the garden to tend. How well I remember the anemic little plants that she sweated over, watering and weeding, sprouting reluctantly from that useless blue clay. I remember her asking my old man to buy a load of topsoil so things might grow. I remember him snarling "There's a whole goddamn YARD full of dirt out there.. Jeezus woman!"
His voice silently shouted that it was because of her that things wouldn't grow in that dry, hard, hungry, inhospitable place
And so she would work at it all spring and summer. Plants crawling upward in rows, brought to the dinner table to be consumed silently. I remember the steaming canner bubbling on the stove as yellow beans were put up, the green tomatoe pickles, and rhubarb relish in Mason jars. I remember summer nights as the sun dipped below the treeline, the smell of wet soil and my mother bent over pulling weeds in the cool evening, I remember green onions dipped in salt, and the pop of a pea pod just before my thumb stripped the sweet orbs into my mouth.
My mother's gardens never belonged to her. My father said where they would go, and how they would be prepared. The earth was no more generous than he was, the blue clay mocked her every effort giving niggardly yields and mocking her sweat.
I remember how her back hurt, and how little any of us appreciated what she didin those gardens.
Four years ago my father died. My mother carried on in the place they lived for two years. In that time she would go out in the summer evenings to the fenced garden plot and smile at the weeds growing there between the chunks of clay. She would declare how much she hated that garden. She would talk of her resentment, and the hours of work for so little and how she would never, ever grow a garden again.
Two years ago my mother moved in with my family. She lives in a comfortable little mobile home at the back of my property with her dog. This year she said to me "Could I have a garden of my own?"
I built it to her exact specifications. She tried at first not to tell me what she wanted, the responsibility scared her. In 48 years of marraige she never got asked what she wanted, she just made do with what she was given. Being asked was a new and frightening experience. Eventually though, I coaxed it out of her. Before long it lay ready for seeding.
The bed is raised two feet so her back doesn't hurt when she works there. It's soil is mushroom manure and screened topsoil. There isn't a single rock in it that's bigger than a dime. My boys and I built it and filled it with our own hands in exactly the spot she pointed at. It is her garden in every sense of the word and is a miniscule part of the tribute she deserves. It's the best I cando and pays her back so little of what I owe. As if in tribute, the plants are sprouting lush and full in the rich bed. Greenness and life fills that twelve by three foot box from corner to corner.
Yesterday, as I strolled across the yard toward her house she came out of her door with a handful of green onions and gave them to me. "Mom" I said "That's YOUR garden, It's for YOU, I shouldn't still be eating your work"
She smiled up at me as the sharp flavour seared my tongue in its familiar way.
"A garden that isn't shared is
a very lonely thing" she said.