Small Gardeners

At our first house the garden was at the back of the yard, up against a fence that divided our lot from the neighbors', the neighbors being the Lewises, who (just as a point of interest) had THIRTEEN children. There were smaller garden patches in other places, from the peas that grew up one side of the house, to the Concord grapes my mother grew for jelly, to the daffodils planted each fall, to the row of pine trees my father planted along the edge of the front yard in the year, I think, we bought the house, when I was one.

When I was seven, we moved to another house, with a bigger yard, and my parents put an enormous garden in the middle of it. I remember when my grandfather came with his tractor to plow up the plot; this memory is crystallized for me in a picture that exists of Alison, rosy cheeks and thick bangs, sitting on said tractor--I think she may have ridden on the back of it all the way from my grandparents' house, two miles away.

This garden was large and square, with even rows and carefully delineated areas, and we were allowed to plant in it too. My mother was the main planter and decision-maker as to what to plant; my father, the primary caretaker, and I can see him crouched in the dirt, thin and agile, weeding, weeding, always weeding. Weeding, of course, is a good job for the perennially anxious, as it is defined and concrete; it is the crossword puzzle of gardening. It is bad for the perennially anxious, though, in that it is infinite: one day's work erased altogether overnight. But enormous vegetable gardens need to be weeded so frequently that we all weeded; we could identify a summer squash sprout and distinguish between it and an infant dandelion almost as early as we could plant a seed.

Although my mother did do the seed purchasing, and this was a working garden--we planted what we ate and ate what we planted--it was large enough for experimentation, for fun. I always wanted to plant something dramatic and impractical: corn, or watermelons. Melons and pumpkins were showy, with their curling tendrils and snaking vines, but they took over space, got stepped on. Any fledgling actual fruits to appear were worried to death: caressed, lifted to show visitors, loved too much.

Harvesting was the most desirable job, with the exception of picking beans at the end of the summer, which grew tedious. But to twist and snap a zucchini, to gather a plateful of ripe red tomatoes, a bumpy, prickly cucumber destined for the pickle jar, was pure unadulterated satisfaction. The best harvesting job, of all, however, was the potatoes. They were planted in hills, the plants leafy and strong, and when we were given the go-ahead, we could dig up the hills.

This is one of the great sensory experiences of my childhood, which I will continue to recreate for my own children: the glorious scratching dig through loose and pale sun-dried dirt, the dark rich soil beneath, knocking fingers up against one little knobby potato, and then another. An Easter egg hunt in a pile of dirt, more potatoes than ever seemed possible, the big ones low and deep, the tiny marble-sized balls by the roots. All gave equal pleasure, all could be rubbed clean in the grass, piled up in a colander or a pail, carried in for presentation, with pride as true as if we'd made them ourselves. Which, in a way--the way gardening gives you ownership, even if you're only seven--we actually had.