I clenched my tiny fist and smiled as the thick, wet dirt oozed between my fingers like playdough. I picked out a worm or two and scooped up another glob of loamy soil. In the other hand I held a small, green plastic shovel that my mother had given to me. It was the type of shovel that would instantly break if you even thought of doing any real work with it. Still, I happily hacked away the weekend afternoon in the garden. My mother was next to me, doing real work with a garden hoe in hand. Being a mindless child with no sense of my surroundings, I hopped around from spot to spot, digging and playing. A few feet away, I saw a Power Ranger action figure partially buried in the soil. It was not uncommon for our toys to find their way outside. So, I scampered over to retrieve it. Before I had even reached out for it, a sharp pain rang out through my body, starting from the top of my head. My hand instinctively reached up and brushed my hair and then returned down to eye level. Small streaks of blood were painted on my fingers. The sharp pain suddenly became a dull, throbbing ache and I began to cry. Within seconds, my mother had urgently carried me away through the yard and into the house. At the the bathroom sink she cleaned the cut and told a sobbing, blubbering me I would be just fine. In my determination to retrieve the power ranger, I had stepped right into the path of her garden hoe.
This is my earliest memory of working in the family garden. Now that I think about it, it’s kind of a miracle I ever went back outside. Well, to be honest, there was no escaping the family garden. From my earliest days, my mother would care for that garden with both surgical precision and motherly love. She would grow tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, carrots, onions, peas, green beans, squash, pumpkins, and rhubarb. She would grow anything and everything. Every year the garden itself grew a couple more feet in size until you could honestly say “our garden has a backyard” instead of “our backyard has a garden.” Then my father dug out a hole in the lawn to make a pond, complete with a small waterfall and a voracious pet turtle. My mother planted fruit trees and would quickly replace the ones that collapsed under the weight of their own bounty. By the time I was in high school, our small backyard was a patch of wild rainforest. As you walked through it, all manner of scents would reach you. Everything from the sweetness of rotting fruit to the fresh scent of wet grass. Grasshoppers would scatter away from your feet, honey bees and flies would drift by lazily, and sometimes the turtle would lunge out from the mossy pond and try to drag you in by the toe. You half expected to hear the songs of tropical birds in the distance.
Despite being literally surrounded by fresh fruits and vegetable, it took me quite some time to really gain an appreciation for home-grown food. My mom would frequently pull carrots out of the garden and hand them to me to eat. Yeah sure, I ate them and they were good, but they weren’t Twinkies or anything like that. Then, one day I randomly decided to pull a ripe cherry tomato off the green, fuzzy vine and toss it into my mouth. The explosion of flavor rewired my brain to love vegetables. It was sweet and sour, juicy and meaty all at the same time. After that moment, I looked at the garden almost the same way I looked at the candy vending machines in my middle school hallways.
We all helped out in the garden, but my mother was the matriarch of the backyard wilderness. I have countless stored images in my mind of her kneeling out in the dirt with her gardening gloves on, trowel in one hand, the other ruffling through the vegetation, perhaps searching for blossoms or bugs. One spring, when I was still quite young, I casually asked her if I could plant something of my own in the garden this year. So, she took me to a small patch of soil and gave me charge over it. But what would I plant? I thought as I rifled through packets of seeds. Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers… they were all boring. No, I wanted to plant something cool! Finally, I found a packet of yellow melon seeds and peanuts. This was perfect. Melons were tropical, and exotic, and the peanuts… well, I didn’t even know that peanuts grew in the ground. So, I rushed to my domain and planted the seeds in a row as I had helped my mother do many times before. I grabbed the water pail, mixed in some fertilizer, and gently rained the elixir of life down on my future harvest. Then, I waited. I came out the next day and watered again and waited. I did this the rest of the week, waiting and watering. I stared hard at the bare soil. I imagined what was happening underneath the surface. Any moment, my peanuts and melons would burst forth and I would feast smugly on the fruits of my labor.
Three weeks later, something happened. Tiny threads of bright green began leaking upwards out of the soil. The sight of the sprouts reinvigorated me. I had nearly given up on them entirely by then. The tiny plants slowly grew and began to shoot out tiny leaves to catch the sun. However, soon my plants began to waver. Some of them began to take on an unhealthy, yellow tinge, some began to droop depressingly, and one afternoon I even had to scare away dozens of tiny grasshoppers who had been feasting on the tender, green shoots. Still, I could not protect them the elements and insects. I had no idea that the life of a young plant was so dangerous and unforgiving. Needless to say, I did not receive any type of harvest late that summer. My plants slowly died and decayed back into the ground from where they had come forth.
Thankfully, the rest of the garden had thrived as always under the care of my mother. Our family dinners from June to October were blessed by a cornucopia of fresh fruits and vegetables. The remaining crop was pickled or bottled. If I learned anything from my earliest attempt at gardening, it is that food comes from the soil beneath our feet. It doesn’t begin at the grocery store or gas station. Beneath the supermarket sales, the coupons, and the loud, colorful advertising, there is a deep, essential bond between humans and the land under their stewardship.
Even today, my wife and I travel back to my childhood home to help my mother make enormous batches of spaghetti sauce. Nearly all of the ingredients are pulled straight out of the family garden that still continues to flourish. Even though all of us brothers have moved away, my mother still conjures forth a wave of tasty miracles. I really hate to brag, but I simply can’t think of anything better than growing up, surrounded by plump tomatoes, prickly cucumbers, and sticks of lip-puckering rhubarb.
