From
way back when I remember my Dad out in his garden plot in our big
side yard. In the background the chickens clucked and pecked the
earth. After he came home from the Army he put in tomato plants every
year that we lived in Affton. Sometimes leaf lettuce too, possibly
carrots. First he took out his spade fork and turned over the soil.
Then he put in the rows of plants, staked them, and tended them
regularly. The earth there was black, fertile enough to support the
plump red fruit we could pick for ourselves. My mother bought us a
bunch of tiny salt shakers, those ones that have a girl with an
umbrella on them. Wash it under the water before you eat it, she
said, and keep this in your pocket. My Dad liked them sliced on top
of lettuce and served with French dressing-- in fact, he ordered them
that way in restaurants along the road when we traveled somewhere.
More
likely my mom just quartered them onto a plate, with the same old
meat, potato, vegetable dinner that was routine for our German
heritage family. She herself loved to plant flowers. We had a few
daffodils that must have been there before we moved into that old
place. It was just a frame house on a double lot with a chicken house
and a garage. It seemed to me as though that plot of ground where we
lived was a huge sort of wealth in some magnanimous way. We had a few
small cedars, some flowering bushes, two box elders that shaded the
roof, besides Mom's wildflower collection on the shady north side of
the house. She liked to walk in the small woods around Gravois Creek
carrying a basket to select out a few sweet williams, blue and white
violets, johnny jump-ups, and so forth, that she fancied would cheer
her up and give her a small nosegay in the kitchen window now and
again. That window looked out over the Deutsch home, which also was on a
double lot, but was actually a larger, brick house, with a
screen house in the side yard. She said she always had to have a
window over the sink to live through housework, and would never
live anywhere where that were not true.
We
lived there until I was twelve. After that we moved more than once,
and the tomatoes were store bought. There just wasn't enough time,
between making a living I presume. We did have some flowers in that
one house in Kentucky, gladiolas every year; and a few roses. My
mother moved the violets from place to place, the ones she had
transplanted in Affton. When she was in her senior years and widowed
the second time around someone once confronted her about digging up
some sweet williams along a roadside, telling her that is illegal,
ma'm. “I think I have a right to do that,” she insisted.
Meanwhile
I had long ago landed my own life, so to speak. So I could stay out
of her nonsense about what she could do with some wild indigenous
plant that has been given environmental rights of its own. She was
just an old Republican, after all. Who still had a room full of house
plants, although she no longer could handle transplanting them
outdoors for the warm months and re-potting them every spring, like
she did when I was a kid.
My
life was not so lucky, and luckier in other ways, since I had a
profession that I worked in for years. Yet I never owned my own
place. I had relationships, friends, chosen family, not the generic
marriages that she discovered for herself, achieving some wealth by
default of love. Still, she could not really pull together the
kindergarten ever again. Her own children could not be together in
the same room. That was how dysfunctional her life grew to be, out of
the Truth that emerged over time; and could not be nurtured by her
into a common space, since she needed in some place within to flee
from some ancient territory of her own. I presumed this history to
have existed by some of her lapses into behavior that I could not
enlighten to the surface with her at all. My mother died three years ago.
At
one point along my own path I had moved into an ashram, a small yoga
community in the country, for about eighteen months. We had a real
life large garden there, planted below the man made damn that held in
a small lake. So the earth under the garden was river bottom, a
tributary to the St. Francois. I helped support it by contributing
the rototiller, and helped plant and harvest its goods for our group
kitchen, where diverse people gathered in larger numbers if we had a
guest teacher over a weekend. One summer we had a week long camp for
children. And we were all living with our chosen abstinences, no
meat, no recreational substances including caffeine, disciplines of
exercising, yoga and meditating every day. In the center of the
expanse of lawn and trees a huge gong hung for the purpose of keeping
us on the clock, ringing us toward morning noon and evening
surrenders to our higher selves.
The
collards were our staple of every group gathering. They grow from
spring to fall-- you can harvest leaves selectively and more leaves
will grow. You have to know how to sweeten them a bit with onions and
a small taste of vinegar to eliminate the bitterness. They are high
in calcium, which is something that seemed essential to us,
especially when we had American Indian teachers there who led us in
sweat lodge ceremonies and vision quests. Other teachers were yoga
gurus, Buddhists, people from a variety of paths, with a level of
Christian underpinnings in the Great Brotherhood. Meanwhile we were
all too human, when push came to shove. My daughter was four when I
moved there, and I had hoped to establish a sort of family that
proved beyond what I could really accomplish in a long term sense
among that group. Yet it is not an experience that I could regret in
terms of what I learned.
So
I continued my part-time self support with a rental contract
everywhere I ever lived in my adult life. Have moved rather
frequently over time. Here I am now, in small town, rural Missouri,
and looking out a kitchen window that has a view of a neighbor's
garden in it, just a few tomato plants. It is a friendly spot on the
earth's surface, and I still dream about gardening on a place of my
own. The cost of living is lower here than in an urban place, and
most stuff is walking distance away. The Great Heat Wave of 2012
causes one to wonder what the earth will be able to support in the
coming of a future that is now. Yet I hope and hope and hope to
reestablish the nostalgic small garden of my youth. On my own small
space on the planet.
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