Beech Tree News Network

We went to visit our daughter, Nikki, and her husband, Thomas, a couple of weeks ago.  They just bought a house in Covington, Louisiana, about 30 minutes north of New Orleans.  They have a nice big backyard for their two dogs and one rabbit, as well as a side yard, where Thomas built a small raised garden.  He and Nikki fussed over it every day we were there, and I had to smile to myself, because recently I found something Nikki had written when she was eleven years old.  It reads: “I think it stinks working on a farm.  You always have to feed cows and horses, work in the garden, shuck corn, shell peas, break beans and pick out sunflower seeds.  The only good things are riding horses and watching my father get drug by a cow whenever he tries to rope one.”  (The last phrase is another story for another day or possibly an entire column.)
    It’s funny how our perceptions change as we grow older.  I think it’s because as children, we see mostly the suffering in an activity like farming.  As adults, we see mostly the benefits.  When I was a kid, I, like Nikki, saw mostly the suffering in farming, especially the garden.  Heat, sweat, bugs and dirt were the main ingredients of a life I wanted no part of.  I’ve always told my husband, Garey, the reason I married him was because he was from Alabama, and didn’t know how to raise tobacco.  Little did I realize that he grew up on a truck farm, and our gardens would be the size of a football fields.  This year, we have a sweet potato row that is 120 feet long. 
    His extreme gardening used to make me crazy.  We’ve had some classic shouting matches in the bean row.  I guess I’ve finally become adult-enough to see more advantages than disadvantages to growing our own food.  I really enjoy fresh veggies, and I freeze or can what we don’t use or give away.
    Last Wednesday, while Garey and I were hoeing out the sweet potatoes, our granddaughter, Sabria, chopped  out the weeds around the tomatoes.  We bought her a hoe just her size, and Garey taught her how to dig out the weeds without harming the plants.  Sabria really got into it, digging great holes between the tomato plants, and telling anything that wasn’t a plant to, “Die weed!  Die!”  She takes gardening really personally.  If you could see Garey go after thistles, you’d understand the genetics involved.  Last year she told on me to Garey when I accidentally chopped down a corn plant, then she told me I should be more careful.
    After she finished hoeing out the tomatoes, she got bored, but we told her we had to finish our work before we could go back up to the house.  I thought I might have to deal with her whining, because Garey had told her he would take her swimming after we finished our work, but she didn’t whine, she just climbed into the pickup and started pilfering through the console.  It brought back memories of when I was a child in the woods with my sisters and my parents, while they were cutting timber and dragging out the logs with a team of mules.  My sisters and I were just ages 6 and 8 at the time, so we found things in the environment to play with, like sticks and rocks and leaves.  We built imaginary houses and walked along the logs that had been piled on the perimeter of the woods, pretending they were streams of water we had to cross to get safely home. 
    When Garey and I finished with the sweet potatoes, I found that Sabria had found two one-dollar bills, which she had rolled into a pair of binoculars.  She had also stacked the change into groups from pennies to quarters, drank most of my bottle of water—she had her own—and eaten half of Garey’s jar of peanuts. 
    A garden teaches you how to wait, not just on the fruits of your labor, but on the actual labor itself.  Labor says, “First things first.”  To a child, it’s an obstacle.  To an adult, it’s a prelude, a promise of what is to come.