making garden

 

The proprietor of the plant nursery on the corner near my office is reworking his greenhouse. I expect shipments will begin arriving any day. I can hardly wait.
I can taste fresh tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, even now. I smell parsley, rosemary and thyme... and lavender in my mind. I am ready to make garden.
My grandbaby is excited at the prospect, too. I have a tiny pair of garden gloves for her but still need to get her a new pair of wellies.
Some of my happiest childhood memories were made in my grandmother's garden. She actually had two- a gorgeous flower garden near the house with sandstone borders on two sides and lilac trees in the corner.
Down the hill and beyond the garage, there was a huge vegetable garden. Always. It was the source of the contents jars stored in the cellar, rows and rows of them. Pickles and beets, tomatoes for soups and stews. They dug potatoes and onions and stored them under the house and put up corn.
Grandma saved seed in baby food jars. A cabinet, painted a shade of aqua we call Grandma blue held labeled jars of seed awaiting their planting.
My papaw died in February. Having just lost my Dad, their only child, two years before, my sisters and I reckoned Grandma would be too devastated and sad to make garden that year. We didn't think of it being therapeutic.
Grandma was raised on a farm. She often said of her mother, our great-grandma Katie, that she "did whatever needed done in the house as fast as she could to get out in the yard and the garden."
Grandma Katie grafted trees and trimmed her shrubbery into beautiful topiaries. She also kept an amazing vegetable garden.
The idea that my gardener Grandma, the daughter of a gardener Grandma, would not make garden one Spring was a completely foriegn concept.
Finally, though, she relented. Or so we thought.
She was quiet on the matter for a bit. Then she implores of my brother-in-law, "just one row, for peas."
He fires up the tiller and fixes a place at the edge of her flower garden to plant peas.
Then she needed just a spot for onions. and a tomato plant, or two. He obliged. and one little row or half row at a time, he broke up the soil for her planting. By the time he/she was done, Grandma had a garden as big and fine as she wanted.
She'd bested us and we didn't even see it coming. But then, she always did.