A glass of iced tea at my elbow and a bucket of string beans between my feet waiting for me to pull the “strings” and snap them in half—pure heaven. Many summer days were spent on my grandmother’s screened porch sharing secrets, talking about boys and politics, school and current events, my hopes for the future and her memories of the past while we processed food from her garden.
Every year my grandparents planted a massive garden of corn, string beans, okra, potatoes, tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, turnips, onions, cucumbers, squash, strawberries and whatever else struck their fancy. Framing the garden area, huge fig trees hung heavy with fruit each summer.
As a child, I followed my grandfather up and down the rows, learning just how deep to plant seeds and seedlings, which grew better in what kind of soil, and most importantly, how to step between the rows, not on the fragile seeds or seedlings. As the seedlings grew, so did the weeds, and my grandmother patiently showed me how to tell the difference, her soft fingers guiding my own.
Before long, tomatoes turned a deep orange red, squash grew rampantly, requiring almost daily picking, sweet corn filled out stiff husks, prickly okra grew beyond thumb length and string beans hung down, ready to be plucked. Then began long afternoons of husking and silking corn, snapping beans and preparing food for canning or freezing, intermingled with lunches of fresh vegetables and crisp salads.
My grandmother loved feeding her family. Their garden provided winter vegetables for not only them, but for each of their three sons’ families as well.
Each fall, the families gathered for several days to can the last of the garden produce. All brought any remaining produce from their own gardens, and we cut, scalded, combined and packed to can large quantities of tomatoes or vegetable soup, a final effort to put stores aside for the coming winter.
But that wasn’t how I saw it as a child. For me, the summers weren’t about winter stores or summer salads. They were about listening to my grandparents.
As we planted, my grandfather taught me not only about how to plant, but he also shared bits and pieces of himself. He instilled his love of the earth, the warm dirt filling his hands and sliding through his fingers as he placed each new plant or seed. His need for open spaces under the warmth of the sun breathing fresh air blended with how to listen to the birds, hear the wind in the trees and smell the heaviness of the air around us to predict the weather to know best when and how to plant. As we listened, he also spoke of who he had been: the boy who played in the creek and how to catch crawdads, how to climb a tree without accidentally putting weight on a weak branch and the young man who went off to war, leaving behind a wife and baby to care for the land in his absence.
My grandmother shared of her time as a little girl and the oldest of ten children, meeting and falling in love with my grandfather and developing a love of storytelling at her father’s feet. Her guidance in the garden often transformed into stories of magical inchworms, adventuresome bunnies and wise birds, instilling a love of story weaving that has lasted a lifetime. I learned to look at the world around me with awe and creativity, playing the game of “what-if” with all I encountered.
As I grew older, my own children spent many hours in my grandparents’ garden. They, too, learned to plant and listen to the land from my grandfather. My grandmother’s stories taught them to view the world with wonder while staining their fingers and tongues with strawberries they’d picked themselves. Dwindling buckets of figs we’d brought home made them beg to go “play in the garden” another day.
My grandparents passed away a few years ago, and the garden is long gone, but the lessons of love, companionship, creativity and life itself imparted to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren have taken root and will continue to grow—a fitting memorial to those precious hours spent in Grandma’s garden.
