Memories cultivated in my aunt's garden

By PHILIP GAILEY

© St. Petersburg Times,
published July 29, 2001

HOMER, Ga. -- Once upon a time, this land I am walking on was a farm where we did back-aching work in the lazy heat of summer. Now, fields that once bloomed white with cotton have grown thick with pine and hardwood, except in a few spots where my siblings and nieces and nephews have built their houses. The house where I grew up has stood empty for years, deteriorating badly. My mother, who turned 89 this month, lives with her only sister, my Aunt Thelma, in a small but comfortable house just up the road from the homestead. Both are widows with heart problems. They have everything they need, including each other.

So much has changed, but on a recent visit home I came upon a familiar scene, a snapshot from the past, that sent the years rolling back in my mind. In a small garden, on top of the hill, Aunt Thelma, who is 84 and suffers from shortness of breath and dizzy spells, sits in a chair between rows of green beans, moving the chair forward a few inches at a time as she picks. She is quick to reject any offer of help, explaining that most people, especially younger people, don't know how to pick beans without damaging the vines. Usually by 9 a.m., she is back home, where she and my mother spend the rest of the morning stringing and snapping beans and preparing them for the freezer while they listen to gospel music on the radio and wait for the obituary announcements at noon.

By her standards, it's not much of a garden -- just a few rows of beans, squash and okra. But at her age, it's about all she can handle. I asked her why, considering her age and health, she still insists on having a garden.

She gave me that look that says, "What kind of dumb question is that?"

Then she gave me her answer: "Because, city boy, we have to eat."

I now realize there is more to it than that. If Aunt Thelma never made another garden, she and my mother would do just fine. They could easily live on the generosity of a few caring neighbors who bring them loads of fresh vegetables from their gardens. They have three large freezers packed with more food than the two of them could possibly consume in the years they have left. One of the freezers is special. In it Aunt Thelma keeps the vegetables, cakes and pies she considers her best -- good enough to be served to family and neighbors who will some day gather on the occasion of her passing from this life.

But back to the garden . . .

She continues to garden not because she and my mother need the food -- neither eats very much -- but because it is the one link she has left to the past. As long as she has a garden, she holds on to a time and a place -- a way of life -- that others her age have let go. It is her refuge in a world that is increasingly unfamiliar to her.

In the rural South, the garden was always about more than just food. It was a source of pride and conversation. When distant kin or friends came calling in the summer months, the talk always turned to gardening. And it was hard to talk about gardens without talking about the weather, which always seemed to be too dry or too wet, and whether planting by the phases of the moon really makes a difference. Guests usually were invited to inspect the garden and gather a basket of its fruits to take home. Aunt Thelma was particularly proud of her okra crop last year. While her neighbors complained that they didn't get a single mess of okra out of their gardens, she could brag that she had more okra than she knew what to do with. People wanted to know her secret, as if there was one. After taking all she needed, she invited neighbors to come in and help themselves.

There was a time in her life when a garden was also considered a measure of one's character. As she once explained it to me, some people were just "too sorry" to make a garden, preferring to mooch off their neighbors. Others would plant a garden and then fail to work it, allowing weeds and grass to overrun it. They weren't much better, in her view. She pointed to the small garden next to hers. It belongs to one of her nieces, and it was hard to see the beans and squash for the grass.

"I'd go hungry before I set foot in that garden," she said, shaking her head. "It's probably crawling with snakes."

She has spent much of her life battling grass with her hoe -- in cotton fields, in gardens and even in her yard. It used to be that respectable people simply did not let grass grow in their yards, which they kept swept clean with brooms made from brush. Over the years she made peace with grass. Her house sits on an acre of lawn, and she has even reserved a burial plot in an all-grass memorial park. Even so, she occasionally will recall how much easier it was to spot a snake slithering across a swept dirt yard. That's important for someone who has spent her life trying to avoid even the sight of a snake.

Aunt Thelma cannot remember a summer when she was not working in the garden, and neither can I. I suspect she would be happy if she drew her last breath sitting in her chair in the bean rows. If that is the way it ends, I told her we might just bury her right there in the garden, between the rows of beans and okra, and sing the old hymn, In the Garden. "That's fine with me," she replied, moving on to the next bean vine.

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