Jon

Younger Days Continued... I didn't know how important those endless,
carefree, forgettable summer evenings were:

The backyard also had a decent sized vegetable garden with rows of
string beans, carrots, and cucumbers. I used to run between the narrow
columns of tomato plants that grew several feet higher taller than my
head. There were two kinds of tomatoes in the garden, 'mini ones,' as
I called them, and the big kind, both of which I did not like. All
summer long Pop Pop took care of them, gently tying their brittle
stems to sticks he drove into the ground next to them, assuring they
wouldn't break even under the weight of august-ripened tomatoes. He
would also throw fertilizer down every so often, little white balls of
'plant food' he called them.

"They'll eat that stuff right up," he told me once, spreading water
across the base of their dirt-covered stems. "That's what makes 'em
grow." The sun went down on that day, as it did on so many others like
it, and again I learned something new.

Whenever I would watch my grandmother plant her flowers, or dig a new
hole for her herbs, I watched her intently. Many times she would pull
my body down to match hers. On all fours we dug into the moist soil,
excavating a hole just big enough for the marigolds or ... to fit.
Once we had our hole, we filled it with water and counted and watched
for it to seep in. Sometimes we didn't wait and stuck the flower's
root-ball in the hole anyway.

"Know push the dirt back and pack it down nicely," she explained.

She showed me how to push my fingers down into the dirt beside the
plant to fill the spaces underneath and pack down the mud around the
roots. I remember my grandmother's moistened hands spotted with the
dark fragments of the rich soil, as she carefully wiped them back and
forth under the cool faucet water to rinse them clean.

To this day, though never as often as my grandmother had, whenever I'm
planting flowers or trees or down on all fours working in a garden, I
find myself mimicking the motions of my grandmother. The way she held
and observed the shoots of colorful blossoms and small shrubs, the
skillful way in which she pulled gently at the dirt below their roots
to let them breath when she replanted them, the beautiful way she
taught me that even the smallest sprouts, if given enough care and
sunshine, can grow into the biggest and brightest flowers in the yard.
I cannot dig a hole or hold a flower without thinking of her, without
her being their with me.