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A harvest of joy

Every day, Ruby Frier spends some time in the garden that has added so much to her own life.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN
Published January 20, 2006

	[Times photos: Skip O'Rourke]
	With a smile on her face 82-year-old Ruby Frier looks over her garden while raking weeds from the rows.
	Ruby plants 2 gardens every year, one for the summer and one for the winter. She likes beans, tomatoes, greens, squash and broccoli. "My soil was very wet this year, and I think that caused some problems" Ruby says as she pokes a young plant.

DOVER - This is where Ruby Frier loves to be, after the dew lifts from the pastures, here in her garden, pushing her handheld plow through the earth's hardness.

Nearby farmers in their trucks and tractors see her out here, on her postage stamp of land.

But few know who she is.

Customers at her neighbor's yard sales spy her across the field in her men's slacks and cotton shirts, her face shadowed by a broad-rimmed sun hat.

"That woman works all the time," they say.

But to Ruby there's nothing laborious about tending her rows of beets and broccoli, grooming her collards and cabbage.

"I love nature, don't you?" says Ruby, who turned 83 on Sunday.

The land has been a constant for Ruby, through the Depression and World War II, through marriage and raising two children, doting on a crop of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

It's where she returns every morning, fighting the aches of arthritis, ignoring the warning of doctors, who took out one of her kidneys years ago.

She returns after all this time not because she has to. But because the land gives as much life to Ruby as she brings forth from it.

Between cutting vegetables and raking away weeds, she catches her breath, girllike, at the wonder of a blue dragonfly, or the flash of a red bird through the garden. She fusses over her petunias and pansies and snap-dragons. Sometimes, with her husband confined inside the house, she sits down alone to rest, if need be, on the yard swing where the pair once shelled peas.

She marvels at the creatures under the dome of a blue sky, even if the world speeding along the road out front seems too busy to notice.

"I like it outdoors," she says. "I guess God just gives me that."

Ruby didn't always like it. Growing up in Plant City, where her father grew strawberries and butter beans, she and her eight siblings worked the fields.

"When I was little, I thought, "I'll be so glad when they quit buying strawberries,' " she says, her voice a whispery Southern accent, an echo of Scarlett O'Hara.

She didn't know that was how her daddy made his living.

As a girl, Ruby quit high school so she could help her parents with the farm work.

They were the strict type, and Ruby did what they wanted.

Over the years, she didn't mind so much being outside. The sun on her back, the dirt in her fingers, the perfume of ripe strawberries - all were as second nature as putting shoes on her feet.

For a time she moved away from the land. After World War II, after she'd married Floyd, the nice man she'd met at their Pentecostal church in Dover, the Army sent him to Germany. Ruby moved into an apartment in the city, Plant City.

She could walk to all the stores and do all her shopping nearby, but she missed the country life and fresh air on her face.

When Floyd returned, the couple bought the 10-acre plot on Dover Road, the place Ruby has called home ever since.

They built a house on a hill near the back of the property, bought some cows and tilled the farm. Floyd was a welder, and Ruby reared the children while he was at work.

As their son and daughter grew, Ruby and Floyd built another home, closer to Dover Road where the children could catch the school bus on the country trail. It's where they live now, in the little white farm house up on cinder blocks, still on Dover Road.

The children grew up and moved away and married and had children and grandchildren of their own, though none left east Hillsborough.

Ruby stayed with Floyd in the little white house amid the quilt of farm fields. For a time once Floyd left welding, both worked outside growing vegetables, mending fences.

More than two years ago, Floyd took to a wheelchair, and their son and his wife moved into a house on the back of the property to take over care of the cows.

These days, Ruby needs to come indoors more often to care for Floyd.

Her son wants her to cut back on the garden. But Ruby's not stopping.

"I push myself with nerve energy," she says. "I like to keep moving."

Her son clears the garden flat with a tractor, but Ruby presses the furrows with her handheld plow. She rakes the dirt and settles the seeds in the ground.

Each row lies straight as a hair pin, not a weed in sight.

Her heads of cabbage grow fat as volleyballs; her sunflowers bloom taller than a grown man. They might inspire envy if the sentiment weren't so contrary to Ruby's Pentecostal faith.

"I give God all the praises for it," she says.

Outside, she doesn't stand still, raking, shuffling, picking a stray frond here, pulling up weeds there.

Her face is creased like the soil; in some lights, her hazel eyes appear leaf green, other times earth brown.

She thinks what awaits her in the next life will top the perfection of one of the pansies she grows.

"They aren't like heaven's going to be," she says.

To see Ruby's rapture in her garden, you'd think they sure might come close.

Times photographer Skip O'Rourke contributed to this report. Saundra Amrhein can be reached at 661-2441 or amrhein@sptimes.com

[Last modified January 19, 2006, 08:52:06]