Lessons From Life’s Garden

Of all the holidays, Thanksgiving is the one most about food. This Thanksgiving weekend, people are coming together - families, friends and community groups - to share meals. In families, traditions about food are often passed on generation to generation. It’s often taken for granted, but when the tradition dies, its deeper value is revealed, as this writer discovered.

The Williams Sonoma catalog arrived at my house recently. A new item was listed on Page 25.

“A longtime favorite timesaver…Made of durable steel…clamps to a tabletop…$38.00.”

I immediately thought of Grandma.

My Grandma loved to shell peas and snap beans. She never had a durable steel timesaver, though, to make her work easier.

After sewing all day in a textile mill, she would take her vegetables and put them in a big wooden bowl balanced in her lap.

Her hands worked hypnotically as she talked with me and my two sisters on the front-porch swing. I still remember the swish-pluck sound of peas being turned out of their shell by the push of her thumb, or the rhythmic snap of a long string bean broken into two or three pieces.

We knew that when the sound stopped, when the bowl was filled with fresh peas or beans, Grandma would go inside and start supper.

Around 5 o’clock, Granddaddy would come home from his hardware store. He was the gardener who had grown the peas or beans in a garden plot behind the red barn, next to the grapevines. I never knew my grandparents not to have a garden, and I never knew the garden not to be beautiful.

Beans, squash, corn, tomatoes. Zucchini, cabbage, potatoes, peppers. Cucumbers, peas, cantaloupe and watermelons. Fig, pear, persimmon and pecan trees. Sometimes, I would walk through the garden rows as Granddaddy watered or weeded, and he would talk about seed hills and firmly planted root stalks and how to tell when a vegetable was ripe. It was magical, the way the earth grew food in this garden. It took me many years to realize how much work was involved.

All summer long, my family ate food “straight from Granddaddy’s garden.” It was especially delicious. There was never any doubt that when you sat down at their table, Granddaddy had grown the food and Grandma had cooked it. If it was winter, you knew that Grandma had also frozen, canned or dried the food that Granddaddy grew, and you were still eating it. If it was Thanksgiving, you knew it was time to shake the branches of the pecan trees, time to start picking up pecans that fell to the ground like thousands of crunchy brown raindrops.

A good garden year meant that a few packs of corn were still in the freezer, just as Granddaddy begin to prepare the earth for another spring planting.

I eventually moved away from the small North Carolina town where my grandparents lived, but I still visited them and the garden every summer. We had a tradition. Outside, Granddaddy would show me the garden. Inside, Grandma would climb precariously on the kitchen stepladder to show me the rows and rows of canned green beans and fig preserves that she had “put up” in the top cabinets.

And they would send me home to Philadelphia with as many grapes, tomatoes, fig preserves and pecans as I could carry.

Once, when I called them from Philadelphia, I spoke longingly of the tomatoes Granddaddy grew, and how they rivaled even the best Jersey tomato. In about a week, a package arrived for me - red, ripe tomatoes, straight from Granddaddy’s garden.

We all grew older. The garden grew smaller, now a plot instead of an acre or two. I returned with my own children to meander down the rows of corn, to chase the cats through the tomato plants. As my children learned to walk and talk, my grandparents’ ability to hear and see and move with ease became impaired.

Granddaddy joked that together, he and Grandma made just one person - “Hattie can see and I can hear!”

But for me, the garden held the secret to their loving, symbiotic relationship. They were married for 68 years. They both worked outside the home and raised three children. But in the garden, among the clumps of red clay earth, their roles were defined, their special talents recognized and appreciated, their hard work rewarded in their collaborative, seamless efforts to get food from the ground to the dining room table.

As I struggled to make sense of my own life, I often marveled at the garden’s lessons about people and life, living and loving, marriage and family. It looked so simple; I knew it was anything but.

Last summer, Granddaddy’s garden consisted only of tomato plants and marigolds near their house. The big garden behind the barn, Grandma reasoned, “was just too much for James now.” Or as Granddaddy put it, “Hattie can’t do all that cooking and canning anymore.” Granddaddy was 93. And Grandma was 90.

One late summer evening last year, they both fell. Within hours of each other, they each broke a hip. They were taken to the same hospital for surgery, then moved to the same extended care nursing home floor. From all accounts, Grandma was miserable, begging Granddaddy to take her home. Granddaddy was miserable, too, because he could not fulfill her last wish.

When Grandma died, Granddaddy cried for days. Eventually, he moved to a room in a nursing home, in his hometown. Faithfully, his sons and daughter take him to visit his house, to sit in the yard under the pecan trees, to look out over the back yard toward the red barn where the garden once grew.

This summer, for the first time in my memory, there was no garden at Grandma and Granddaddy’s house. There were no rows of sparkling fig preserves in the top cabinet. Their children reluctantly cleaned out and packed away most of the house, and they asked the grandchildren if they wanted anything special.

How could I explain that I wanted the garden, and all that grew in it?

Instead, I threw out the Williams Sonoma catalog and its time-saving pea sheller. After work, I sat on my own front-porch swing with my children, and shelled my store-bought peas. My sons and I planted cucumber and melon seeds in a tiny patch of sunbathed earth near our house. And before summer’s end, we carefully packed a freshly picked cucumber in a shoe box and mailed it to Granddaddy.

I told him it was “straight from our garden.” And he said it was delicious.

MEMO: Margaret O. Kirk is a Philadelphia-based freelance writer. Her stories regularly appear in the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer.