Garden Flashbacks

It’s been a long time since I’ve had a vegetable garden.

This time of year I miss poring over the oversized, colorful pages of the Gurney catalog, and hoeing long rows on sunny-but-not-too-hot spring days. I miss kneeling in the soft dirt, sprinkling the teeny-tiniest seeds through my fingers, and watching fragile, grass-like seedlings of lettuce, spinach and radish miraculously peek out of the dirt on still-frosty mornings: the first crops of the season.

Years ago I worked hard at gardening, as if the family might starve if I didn’t throw myself into cultivating our own food. Fritz roto-tilled the ground with the old Gravely, and then the rest was pretty much up to me. By Easter-time the garden plot was in the process of death-to-life-metamorphosis, and the season lasted through September or, depending on the weather, early October. I was a compulsive gardener, bonding with the earth as well as the plants emerging from it.

I watched over my vegetables like a mother hen, watering them on dry days and battling tenacious, unwanted grasses and other weeds. Tomatoes, corn, peppers, broccoli, green beans, peas, carrots, lettuce, spinach and beets flourished in long – if weedy - rows. Cucumbers and squash grew in their own shady hideouts beneath huge leaves, the fruit of vines that climbed beyond the confines of the garden as if on a quest to discover freedom beyond the fence. Towering sunflowers bordered three sides of the plot while a few marigolds prettied the other (more accessible) side.

It’s probably been over 15 years since I’ve had a garden. But today I’m recalling and celebrating specific garden-related memories, and what it was like to savor “sweet one-hundred” baby tomatoes while still hot-from-the-sun; soak broccoli heads in a salt-water-filled sink to lure out hidden bugs; retrieve “shellie-beans” (the mature seeds from overripe green beans); husk and de-silk warm ears of corn; listen to the rattle of quart jars full of Big Boy tomatoes in the canner. I’d like to go back, if just for one season, and pick snow peas from vines climbing the fence with eager tendrils; pull the red-striped-green-leaves of oversized beets mounding out of the ground; watch the pumpkins grow to become jack-o-lantern material.

Then why don’t I plant another garden? I’m not sure I’d be up to the physical work at this age AND our two plots no longer exist. The larger one is currently studded with 4-5’ tall volunteer walnut and maple trees, and it floods regularly now that Buck Creek has been made into a more swiftly-moving ditch before it reaches our property. The smaller one has new septic drainage fingers from our house running beneath it, and is once again part of the pasture. Also, we’ve been spending most of the summer months at the lake house in Michigan where there is no room for a garden, and too much shade. So…those are my excuses.

But I’m realizing old garden-moments are worth remembering, those times that once offered solace, purpose and promise even in the midst of long hours of back-breaking labor. They remind me of the cyclic nature of life, of the Easter season and life beyond the grave, of the necessity of growth before harvest, and that being submitted to the elements on your knees under an open sky is a good place to be. They take me beyond everyday cooking and laundry, plastic credit cards, technological gizmos and addictions to email - back to sweat and dirt under my fingernails and a sense of my own identity as molded clay. They link me to what is basic and practical and Real, and leave me kneeling internally before the God who brings life and fruitfulness from my own dormancy