In the Garden I Grow

When I told my husband I planned to spend Saturday morning picking strawberries, he teased.

“You’ll be the only little chocolate drop out there,” he said. “Black people ain’t picking NOTHING – no more!”

I burst out laughing and explained that I like to get my hands in the dirt. It’s a way of connecting to the earth. Also, I have fond memories of gardening with my paternal grandparents. Every year, since I was a young girl and they were retired, I watched them delight in their harvest of corn, okra, green beans, lettuce, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, radish, kale, collards, and other veggies. Grandma, even more than Granddad, eagerly anticipated the spring, waiting for the first break in the frost so they could till their plots. I had watched them pickle and “can” enough produce to last them through the winter and afford them significant savings in their grocery bills. My mother and her mother-in-law, my maternal Grandma, had welcomed me to their garden, where I learned to plant, weed, and harvest beets, carrots, yams, and other veggies right in the heart of “the urban jungle” where we lived.

I’d live in a row house in the inner city of the Nation’s Capitol. My Grandparents had gardens in the rear and on the side of their brick house and also manned a plot in a nearby community garden. Y mother and paternal grandmother had a plot in community garden in another area of the city. Gardening, to me, meant ensuring your own food in case any major calamity hit and the grocery stores and its supplies ever shut down. Gardening meant working your connection to the earth to secure your and your family’s survival.

Although I have neither the time, energy, or inclination to create and maintain my own garden these days, I enjoy novelty gardening.

“Why don’t you do this: save up your little money, buy the strawberry farm, and spare the whole race the embarrassment of you going out there picking the white man’s strawberries,” my husband teased.

I enjoyed a hearty laugh with him, but proceeded to the strawberry patch.

With my sleeves rolled up, kneeling down with my flat box in hand, I suddenly remembered one more thing I loved about gardening: my great grandparents had kept a strawberry patch in their backyard, located in the heart of Washington, D.C., for me and my cousins. Kneeling and picking strawberries now – in my 40s – I was reminded of days in my youth when I first learned to pick strawberries in my great-grandparents’ back yard. I remembered eating as many as I “saved for later.” My great grandparents and grandparents had experienced The Great Depression and believed in “saving for hard times.”

I recalled other lessons I had learned through gardening – and from my grandparents and great grandparents who gardened.

I was helping my grandparents prep their soil for seeds one year and Grandddad told me why I had to chop and pull up some old weeds that had branched out from a tall tree in their yard.

“The old roots will choke out roots from your new plants. You’ve got to cut those old roots out,” Granddad said. I thought about that one comment for weeks, and applied it to other areas of my life: cut out the old or it will choke the life out of what’s new.

Weeds – which are “unintended plants” – will drain nutrients from the soil and destroy your “intended plants,” Grand Dad believed. But I delighted in unintended red tulips that showed up in my yard.  I allowed them to live until they died a natural death.

In the garden, I realized I must root out some of my grandparents’ beliefs and traditions in order for my own to grow.

Resourceful Sisters

As my best friend from high school dressed her daughter for the prom, we reminisced about our own high school days. We laughed about playing hooky once or twice, and fell out recalling antics in the hallways before and after school.

“I got banned from the band room forever!” my friend said. We laughed like waters gushing from a damn. Days later, we were laughing again remembering other high school treasures. I recalled her older sister proudly making her own prom dress, and that stirred memories of when all of us sewed.

“Remember that polka-dot outfit you made!” my friend, Chee-Chee said, howling with laughter. “Damn polka-dot culottes!

“Girl yeah! I made a light blue set just like it. Those were the pieces for my first professional wardrobe! Remember? I had an internship and had to dress up. Chile please, I put on my white buckle-up sandals, one of those outfits and you couldn’t tell me nothing!”

“And that green dress you made!” she continued.

“Oh girl! Remember I had to make the pattern outta newspaper!”

“Hey. You had to do what you had to do!” she said, laughing.

“We was some resourceful sisters!” I said laughing.

“Remember that time we saw that outfit at the store but I couldn’t afford it? Then a couple weeks later you was like, ‘You got it!” And I told you I made it!”

We had taken “Home Economics” classes in junior high school and high school. There, we had learned to cook and sew. My grandmother had given me a sewing machine. Chee-Chee had used her big sister’s sewing machine. Chee-Chee was a plus-size and found it easier to make the clothes she wanted than to shop for them. I was – uh – economically challenged and found it was cheaper to make clothes than to spend all my summer job earnings on them. But then you could buy a yard of fabric for $1.49 and I could make a skit and top with two yards, some thread, my time and creativity.

“You know how old we sound?” I told my friend as we reminisced about our good old days, declaring them better than these days.

“Embrace it Honey,” she said.

In our 40s, we’re accepting the inevitability of “middle-age” picking off our youth. We agreed on the value of our out-dated home economic classes.

“They don’t even teach home economics anymore,” she said. “Kids don’t learn how to cook!”

“Who needs to cook these days?” I said. “Po something in the microwave and call it a day!”

“That stuff’s no good for you. That’s why everybody’s so fat!” she said.

“I know. Those quick meals don’t really satisfy our taste buds and don’t really nourish our bodies – that’s why we keep eating,” I said.

“That stuff’s got all them hormones,” she said.

“I know. I try to get back to basics as much as I can.”

“You got to,” she said.

“We know what to do, we just gotta do it,” I said.

She agreed.