Ever since I was little, gardens - especially of the vegetable sort - have been familiar settings. My earliest recollections are of pattering around, running barefoot up and down the lined spaces between rows of beans or corn or tomatoes, or jumping over the mounded plants when they were still young, just to see if my leaps were broad enough to carry me “cross-row”. And while I was still young, the occasional snapped vine or branch or smooshed squash under my inexperienced feet in no way diminished my enjoyment of “gardening”. The warmth and even the smell of the dirt between and around the plants always charmed my senses. As I grew, attendance in the garden transformed into a noxious, enforced labor experience; I imagine all of my siblings recall the recurring summer edict to “spend 30 minutes weeding in the garden.” The only, I mean only, benefit was the freedom to graze while out there. Perhaps, however, the quiet solitude was its greatest value. Nevertheless, I was probably my most truculent self whenever I heard “the edict” that naturally implied I couldn’t spend every moment of summer engaged in pursuits of my own design and choosing.
The vegetables we grew at 415 Titicut were the most incomparably tasty I’ve ever had. The smart reader out there is already either refuting that statement or amending it. It’s true that, like with all our other senses, our sense of taste falters as we age. (For women, it typically happens in our fifties, while men can luxuriate in sweet, sour, bitter, savory, and salty into their sixties). Did you know that our taste buds (which resemble garlic bulbs) are assigned different roles, and according to their assignment, are located in different parts of the mouth? Next time you bite into something sour, see if you notice the left and right sides of your tongue responding. Bite into something bitter, and you’ll notice it when it reaches the back of your tongue. Something sweet? You’ll perceive that the instant it touches the tip of your tongue. And, finally, salt-detecting buds located between the sweet and sour ones will have you scrunching your face when you chomp on just about any entrée served at Cheesecake Factory.
Where it concerns the hobby of gardening I can’t boast deep understanding. My general knowledge springs from personal experience, and this is the trick that invariably worked on Titicut Hill: get the prison to deliver an extra wagonload of cow manure in late March or early April while they’re spreading it all over the fields that surround your house lot . Offer a carton of cigarettes to get them to also plough, thus saving you the impossible task of turning blue clay soil with laughably inadequate farm tools. (Would that be a tiller? A shovel? Were it to be a shovel, the tenant farmers of Titicut Hill would still be hopping up and down on their shovel steps today.) Next, create neat, ridged rows; then tamp in liberal quantities of seeds. Unless you’re “fastidious”, there’s no real need to mark where things are; when they start to grow, it’s exciting to guess what the plants are. At any rate, when they start producing, you should have a fair idea of what they are. Weeds are the easiest to detect, but the most obdurate in terms of removal and flogging into submission. They represent the rule-breakers as well as spirit-crushers of the garden. . . and lawn, of course. And they have one single value: if you take one hearty blade of grass and hold it tightly pressed between the thumbs of your two cupped hands, you can get it to sing. Ok, so maybe not “sing”, so much as screech. (That will only make sense if you’ve ever done it; otherwise, ignore grass’s one true value.)
None of this suggests that I understand gardening, just that I spent a substantial amount of time in gardens in the formative years. For several years after George and I first moved to Salisbury, “we” had a large, flourishing garden. And for the first few years, George deferred to me on most garden matters. He can - and should - be forgiven for believing that I knew how to garden; after all, I was a girl from rural America, and before we were married, he had taken great pleasure in oodles of meals prepared with vegetables from my family’s garden, meals that typically involved no fuss and minimal seasoning, but were delicious nevertheless.
Then one day, after having stretched my luck too far, the jig was up. I had either suggested that garlic and onions are perfectly compatible with beans, or - more scandalous - that all good vegetables can become great vegetables if you apply a generous covering of raw manure to your garden. Be reasonable here; one can easily see how my personally-developed farming manual would include such wisdom under the chapter “Best Soil Enrichment Practices”. Of all the ways that a wife can disappoint a husband, I never anticipated the degree of shame that I would feel the day when George looked at me with skepticism and dismay, saying simply, “You really don’t know anything about gardening, do you?” Well, yes, I thought I did. Gardening was simple: manure, ploughing, tossing in seeds, and getting someone to weed “as needed”.
Going forward, whether it was composting techniques, proper hilling of potatoes, dedicating sufficient space for pumpkins, planting winter rye, making the move toward 100% organic gardening, even camouflaging cannabis; George kept his own counsel. He was a very good farmer. As the “farmer’s wife” (as Big George used to call me), I harvested our bounty and prepared meals, carved pumpkins with our two daughters, and - on occasion - smoked weed.
