My Dad and My Garden

This weekend we are honoring my parents’ legacy with a memorial service, and I was digging through my computer for my writings about them. Stumbled upon this old blog that I never posted; written in 2020. It is meaningful to me. Perhaps it will be meaningful to you, too.

I am sitting on the deck tonight. It’s 8:18 pm as I start this; just got home from teaching. The children always went to their father’s house on Tuesday nights, so I've gotten in the rhythm of making it my late-night to teach.

Alone with my thoughts, and a drink, and a snack. Soaking up the evening sounds.

I’m also a child of the times. Driving home I was listening to the Homestead Family on YouTube, so communing with my phone. I deeply appreciate their wisdom; brushing up on skills that are going to be needed in the coming days. Old fashioned skills. Like gardening and homesteading and puttin’ up food.

In front of me, the view is my land.

My land!

And my new garden. My new pandemic garden. Not that I’m new to gardening. But I’m new to having the TIME to garden. Gardens wait for no one. Especially yoga teachers working a 50-hour week and traveling multiple times during the growing season.

So, this garden; it is different.

I’ve had my own garden since I was a little girl buying Burpee’s First White Marigolds with my babysitting money (Google that … lol). But it has taken time to get this plot of mountain land ready for growing food. Had five trees taken down by Brown Hound Tree Service this past May. To compliment the fourteen huge trees Salem Tree Service chopped down when I first landed here.

There is finally a decent patch of sunshine on the mountain.

Oh sister trees -- beautiful oaks and pines; thank you for letting me make

this difficult choice; for letting me use you for firewood so that I can borrow sunshine

for food. Amen, Aho, Amin. Namaste.

Off to the right, the garden. It started as a postage stamp shielded from the nibbling deer folk. A tiny four-by- six square of a few greens and edible weeds. But now; it is a true garden. A multi-layered potage’ of great beauty and wealth built through hours of time. Pandemic gifted time of my sweetheart, my son, and me.

Ribbons of squash vines rippling out in waves; giant fronds of zucchini leaves hiding edible blossoms and burgeoning fruit. Tangles of tomatoes; bouquets of basil; beans and cabbage and cucumbers and onions and chard and herbs and more.

My Dad is dying. We just got the news tonight. He’s been almost dying many times; so many sharp turns to despair. Usually Western medicine has him covered; surgeries and medicines and interventions and rescues. The heart, the gallbladder, the appendix, the prostate, the heart, the heart, the heart … and the lungs.

He is now 83 years old – why do we say old?

He is 83 years into this Earth life, this curriculum; this spin around the Sun.

This garden; and my house; my land. The only place I’ve ever owned by myself; he has never seen it. Always too frail to come here; six years now.

I wish he could see my home.

This garden; birthed out of nowhere, but not really. Birthed out of my experience. Because he taught me. He showed me. My Dad scratched a lot of things out of nothing.

His Father was a barber; his Mother, a homemaker. During the Great Depression; during the *great* Wars. His stories and his struggle, they shaped and formed me; his worries became mind. His skills also settled in my soul.

Growing up, we always had a garden. It was enormous by neighborhood standards.

But it was never enough; he always sought out other spaces to farm.

He cultivated every patch of land he could – our backyard; the back of my Mom’s parent’s property; a huge patch at his parents’ house.

Such formative experiences, nurturing the triad of gardens. Mulching and weeding; planting and harvesting. Trips to mushroom farms for compost, hunching down and wandering through the “fields.” Rounding up so many bags of leaves in the Fall from every neighbor’s curb.

Did you know that people hide garbage in their bags of leaves? And bricks and rocks too? Yeah; now you know.

Turning the compost pile; thick worms everywhere; sought out in a gentle rain, my squishing tennis shoes with a flashlight. Gathering them up for fishing a weekend of fishing at a local lake. Such memories.

Eventually, my Dad had his own land, too. This owning of property; this space to grow. I feel it deep inside me. And on his land, he carved out many gardens despite the burgeoning shade. The berry patch on the hill; the vegetables and dahlias and sunflowers close to the house. The potato patch on the lower section, near where Hazel’s house used to be. The rows of corn next to the barn.

We’ve been apart most of these years; my Dad and me. I moved out at 19; to a different state at 20; and took root in Virginia at age 22.

My last few years in my Father’s home were adolescent years of conflict; misunderstanding. His rules and values and mine.

And then, in my early twenties, years of weaving and tearing and reweaving our relationship. Too much alike and yet so very different, us two. A couple of stubborn souls who love big and hard and usually think we know what is best for everyone. Just give us a patch of Earth and some seeds and we’ll show you how to get raised up right.

Right?

But now, he is leaving; his gardening days are done. His journey showing me the limit of my own. I have only a few more years of ambitious digging and planting and sowing and harvesting.

Suddenly this world has become more like the world of lack and struggle that he grew up in instead of the world of plenty that I knew.

Have I honored his legacy? Will I carry on this understanding and this knowledge?

Have I told him I loved him enough? And have I learned what I need to know to survive?

Shanti,

Jill