Beech Tree News Network

The morning after my husband’s release from the hospital, where he had been because of heart problems, he went blackberry picking.  When I got home yesterday, he was in the garden picking Crowder peas.  It was pouring down rain.  I wasn’t surprised.  A couple of days before, he brought in a bucket of tomatoes and told me some home-made salsa would taste really good.  I’m used to Garey’s anxiety over produce.  I’ve lived with him for nearly thirty-eight years, after all. 
    I used to buckle under the pressure of that anxiety, canning, freezing and preserving everything in sight.  He says things like, “Can what you can, eat what you can’t and don’t worry about the rest,” but he doesn’t really mean it, hence his picking peas in the rain.  Garey is the same way about nuts that fall from the trees on our farm.  He’s always out gathering something.  I think he feels personally responsible for every edible thing growing on our place.
    For many of the years we’ve been together, we’ve raised huge, overwhelming gardens.  I use the word, overwhelming, to refer to my attitude, not his.  In general, I prefer life to be in neat, manageable rows.  Disarray doesn’t seem to bother Garey.  He just hacks his way through, thrilled at the little gems he finds in the process.  “Look what I found,” he might say, as he pulls a watermelon from under a stand of pig weeds.  I like a treasure hunt as much as the next person, but I’m a bit hesitant to go digging around in an area covered with foliage.  At best, I might get snapped at by a disgruntled turtle; and God help, if I come upon a snake under all that.  No, I want my produce where I can see it, preferably from a distance.
    It is of little mystery to me that man’s initial fall from grace, happened in a garden.  It has been the scene of some of the worst fights Garey and I have ever engaged in—one in particular becoming community legend, because the neighbors opened their windows to see what all the yelling was about. 
It was hot that year—90 degrees-plus hot—and I had fought with weeds till my fingers were stained green and blisters were forming at the base of both thumbs from gripping a hoe handle.  My two nieces and my nephew were visiting from out of town, and the kids had been arguing all day, reporting from the top of the hill above the garden about every minor infraction that had occurred. 
    At some point, I’d had enough of the arguing and warned them all that the next person who yelled something insignificant would be put to work right beside me, also telling them not to disturb me again unless someone was bleeding.  (To be fair to the kids, they helped shuck corn, shell peas, break beans and churn out tomato juice.  I didn’t really trust them with a hoe, because I could barely see the plants through the weeds, and I figured they would do more destruction than good.)
     I returned to the task at hand, growing more disgruntled as the afternoon wore on.  About an hour had passed since I’d heard from the kids.  I was congratulating myself on the effectiveness of that empty threat when my oldest daughter appeared at the top of the hill, screaming, “Mom, I’m bleeding!”  I dropped the hoe, and ran up the hill to where she was sitting.  She had stubbed her toe on the kitchen table leg, and there was a small drop of blood forming in the cuticle of her big toe.  I was livid.  After giving her a tongue thrashing that would have made my stepmom proud, I sent her back into the house, and I returned to the garden.
    Enter Garey Hughes, who had just finished a long hot day at work.  (He worked in coal mining at the time.)  By the time he got to the bottom of the hill, I was using the hoe like a machete, whacking down everything in sight.  I don’t remember what I said to him, rather what I screamed at him, but I remember what he said to me.  “Get out of my garden and don’t let me see you back in it!”  He went on to threaten that if he did catch me back in it, he would plant his boot in an anatomical part of my body that would make it very difficult for me to carry out necessary bodily functions.  He didn’t have to tell me twice.  The last place I wanted to be was in that garden.  I stayed out of his garden the rest of that summer, gladly allowing him to collect produce that the kids and I put up. 
    We’ve had a few years that we didn’t plant a garden, but most years we still have a pretty big one.  Garey does most of the work in it.  He tills and hoes and weeds until the rows appear as though they’ve been landscaped.  What I don’t can or freeze, he gives to the neighbors, so he doesn’t have to worry about anything going to waste.  It has become our compromise, a way of working through our differences.  Look at us.  We’ve become adults.