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Inspired Inspired is Culinary Communion's way of sharing creative food-related
art with our Foodie Community. We're adding creative writing (nonfiction, fiction, or
poetry) and visual art to our web site and newsletters.
If you, or someone you know, is interested in contributing poetry, short fiction, nonfiction, paintings, drawings, or
other art to be published in our newsletter and on the web site for the foodie community to appreciate, please
let me know. At right, "Travel Talk Before Dinner" by Patianne Stevenson, reproduced with permission. March's "Inspired" piece will warm us all with the memory of hot sunshine and green gardens. Enjoy! Making the Garden by Heidi Kenyon Copyright 2003 by Heidi Kenyon. All rights reserved. Punctuating a hot, silent afternoon: the repeated metallic sound of spade on dirt. I am making a garden, my first garden. It is hard work, but feels good. Straighten up. Position shovel, with foot poised on it. Step down hard, forcing shovel into earth with foot, leg, upper back, and shoulders. Jump onto shovel with other foot; balance; bounce up and down and side to side. All 106 pounds of me isn’t very effective at persuading that shovel down into the clay-marbled earth, but with a little jimmying I can make it go. Now lift, using leverage to break grass roots. Remove shovel, reposition at a ninety-degree angle from first cut. Repeat, repeat, repeat, until a pitifully small square of earth has been loosened and can be lifted from the ground. Repeat. When a row has been cut, I have my own permission to look back on my handiwork, take a sip of lemonade, and, for a change of pace, go back and thump all the dirt out of those clumps of sod. When I get to the end of the row, I allow myself to stand and look back at my progress. There is dismally little of it. Feeling the trickle of sweat down my face, standing there with one foot on the shovel surveying my small brown dent in the seeming vastness of the back yard, I feel somewhat small. It goes slowly, but I am determined. I spend some of the time remembering the other garden-making experience I’ve had, as a fifteen-year-old toiling sullenly on a new garden patch under the dictatorship of my mother. I remember kneeling in the still-tiny patch of broken earth, picking up the loosened chunks of sod, bashing them against a rock to get the dirt out before tossing them into the wheelbarrow. The sun had been blistering down, and sweat rivulets washed odd clean stripes on our faces. My brother and I hated it. Each movement we made had been accompanied by a grown, each new piece of sod lifted with a dramatic half-sob. One particularly inspired rhetorical question met with an answer that shut us up for the remainder of the day: “Oh, why do we have to do this?” my brother had cried, rocking back on his heels, his expression absolutely tragic. He had stopped thumping; my mother had not. Dirt sprayed out from her chunk of sod with each whack on the ground she gave it. She emptied the chunk of as much dirt as possible and tossed the grass into the almost-full wheelbarrow. I had not given up on my clod, but I listened carefully for the answer. I would have much preferred to be reading a science fiction novel. My brother was about ready to whine his question a little more loudly when Mom spoke. “When I was a kid, my dad made us work in his garden. And boy, if we ever talked back to him…Whacko!” She had emphasized this with an extra-vigorous smack of her piece of sod, but had not looked up. She said it matter-of-factly. I shut my eyes against the image, and my brother returned to work immediately. Back then I could picture my mother slaving away in Grandpa’s garden; I could identify with her. She must have hated it just as much as I had. I pictured her kneeling in the rows, a sixties version of myself, secretly plotting to salt the earth, pulling each weed with a little jerk of planned vengeance. My mother and I, twin victims of a garden lover. But somehow I could not associate that vision of Mom, separated from me by only a generation, linked with me by our mutual hatred of working in the garden, with the mom who led our small work force out to the plot every day with a smile. They could not be the same person, one nursing her resentment and getting, ironically, more work out of her angry hoeing, the other caught actually smiling into the brown dirt as she shaped it into a place for life to take hold. Yet there must have been a connection, because that same bridge is somewhere in me, years later, as I exhaust myself over my own garden and remember my own 9th-grade hatred of all matters concerning dirt. I dig the shovel again and again into the earth, for no reason other than my own satisfaction. Finishing the garden is anticlimactic. I just dig the spade in once more, pull it out, kneel, shake the dirt out of one last piece of sod, and I am done. I stand leaning on the shovel, surprised. That’s all I do? And now I just plant? I look over my work, a brown scar in the green of the back yard, a small ocean of exposed earth, ripe and ready for my fingers to fill it with life. Then I go to get the seeds. I am meticulous, planning everything out. I have a tape measure, stakes, string, a permanent marker, and a hoe for making furrows. I measure and stake and string and mark for an hour or so, and then, unable to fuss any further, open the first package of seeds. Seeds are funny things. They seem magic to me. Looking at the little pile of tiny, shriveled little bits in my hand I wonder how in the world these little things can turn into plants. There is a flicker of life in seeds that is invisible to the naked eye and cannot be felt with the fingers, but if you precipitate the miracle—if you plant them in a garden—that life will emerge. I cup them carefully and funnel them into the brown earth, patting it over them as I would tuck a child in for the night. I feel strangely unfinished then, when all the seeds have been carefully planted: now what? I wait ridiculously in the fading afternoon light for the seeds to grow. The first sprouts thrill me. It’s working! I get down on my knees before each one, lowering my head to its level, observing carefully every facet of its existence. The slender, pale green neck of the plant, the first two leaves folded and tucked like a little head bowed in prayer. Down close I can see the tiny veins in the newborn leaves and follow the little plant down to where it disappeared into the dark dirt, tracing its passage beyond that point with my imagination. I hover with my cheek just above the soil, feeling the earth in my hands and underneath my knees, listening for the slow-stretching roots of each plantlet. I breathe on each plant, and kiss some of them, trying their newness with the practiced sensors of my lips. Although in later months their produce will nourish me, it is impossible now to consider consuming these delicate growths. Their tender lives are fresh from my hands. In the beginning weeks I tend the garden faithfully, pulling those nasty weeds with a tweak of thumb and finger before they are big enough to even cast a shadow on my precious plants. As the garden grows, though, it seems more and more self-sufficient and, like a parent with a growing child-though probably without the empty-nest reluctance-I find myself giving it less and less attention. More and more I prefer to stand and watch it rather than fuss over it. I like the way the wind moves the adolescent shafts of corn, and the pregnant promise of the green-to-gold tomatoes. At this stage in my garden experience, too, I begin to spend a lot of time with cookbooks, reading recipe after recipe for salads, soups, and vegetable quiche. I salivate over memories of cookouts at Grammy’s house, with Michigan corn glistening in butter and succulent, sopping-with-flavor tomatoes, the most important component of any proper hamburger. The garden grows. So, I am to realize later, do I. Watching, smelling, feeling the green growing things that I worked for with my own hands, feet, knees, and aching back, I begin to understand the path that my mother must have taken, from resentment in the rows of her father’s garden to revelation in those of her own. It was the same path that I had traveled-was traveling-on my own, similar journey. I become aware of the time that I first began to realize the real meaning of a garden, the existence it had beyond creating work for precocious teens. Standing in my mother’s garden, later in the summer of its creation, shoulder-high in green beans, I had felt the first fingers of understanding tapping for entrance somewhere inside me. The smell of the earth and of the twisting vines mingled with the hot slick luxury of the sun on my long hair. The beans felt firm and full and fitting to my fingers, their skin not smooth, not rough, but somehow static, like Velcro. They attached themselves for minute moments to the tiny grooves of my fingerprints. My hands knew their own way between the leaves and vines, and I could find the beans hidden there with my eyes closed-except that, doing that, I might startle myself by finding a daddy long-legs, too. Even that didn’t make me shriek and jerk away as it ordinarily would have. I felt a part of what was there, just another member of the community inside the garden fence, and yet greatly privileged to be such. I felt suddenly, oddly beautiful standing there in my mother’s garden, the earth dry and warm under my bare feet, the sky wide and welcoming above. It was the first time I had ever felt that way, and I was beginning to realize my desire to feel that way again. Out in the garden with a paper bag, picking produce, I’d wondered if my mother had liked the tickle-prickle of cucumber spines, the roundness and resonating thump of a pumpkin, the sweet touch of corn silks still on the stalk. Had she giggled at the realization that that pungent stuff wasn’t peppermint because the cat was rolling in it? Walking back through the rows, had she too stopped and stepped back to see that beguiling flash of red from within the tomato tangle? It was the hum of life within the garden that called to me, the feeling that if I sat still enough and long enough I would hear the rustle of things growing. I began to love the lazy filter of sunlight down through the opaque greenness, and the sense I got of my own gratitude, rising from me like steam from the thick earth after a rain. I wondered if my mother felt this, had loved this being away from others yet not quite alone in the garden. In my own garden, under the blazing Idaho sun or at dusk when the mixture of the cool evening and the earth’s release of pent-up heat stirs a little breeze, I feel this strong natural beauty again. It is not something that comes from me, or something that comes from my garden, but the golden hum of our dual existence. There is something else, too. I am proud and honored to be a part of this creation. Remembering my sore muscles, I am filled with gratitude in the knowledge that I participated in this. I am making this garden, and in some senses, it is making me. Contents Copyright 2003 by Heidi Kenyon. All rights reserved. No part of this composition may be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form, electronic, mechanical, or other, or by any means, without written permission of the author. For permissions, email us. |
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