Garden Lesson

Stories begin much like rivers and creeks do. Not all at once, and they collect their force of thought gradually and from many sources, until all the pieces are running and joining together to form a strong current. I hardly know if this small bit of my own story is worth telling, but I think it may be. It tells how I learned of one of the first things I ever knew about...gardening.

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  “Rachel, please come here, dear,” my mother called me to her side, and I went. My loving mother looked down on me, taking in my small face & eyes. She spoke again, “Have you been having a good play?” I had, so I answered, “Oh yes. I’ve been playing with my dolls, Momma.” She smiles, “I know, my Rachel. But now, I have something else for you and I to do together.” Her eyes twinkle, as they say, and my small mind wondered, What could she mean?

  Pretty soon I found out—Mother & I were going out to the garden to pick things, and since I was only five years old, this was an amazing adventure for me. She held my hand as we slowly walked along the front walk, and then stepped off into the grass. There is where I slowed down even more, for fear of stepping on bees in the clover with my bare little feet; but my Mother was patient.

  Soon enough (for a warm summer day) we made it to the garden. I had as a little thing always heard about the garden, for my parents of course talked about what was to be planted, weeded, and picked. But I had never been in the garden. How exciting! As Mother opened the twig-fence gate and led me inside, the first thing I noticed was the strange, crumbly texture of the dirt under my toes. It was warm, and sometimes soft, sometimes hard—like stale bread or brownies. I look up at Mother and see that she is looking over the garden rows. I follow her eyes and see lots of green plants bearing different shapes of fruits. Tomatoes, green beans, beets and carrots growing on the ground, and the large squash plants crawling here and there.

  We walk slowly in between the rows, and as we do, I reach out my hand to touch all this... I find the tomatoes are soft and fuzzy, and slightly sticky. The beet leaves are smooth and dirty on their tops from rain splashing. I stoop down (and Mother crouches too) and find that the beets and carrots themselves are hard and smooth, and warm like the ground. Only the very edges of them peak up at at me out of the earth. I look up at Mother.

“Why are they in the ground, Mother?” 

“Why, that’s where they grow, Rachel. In the ground.”

Then I ask, "But why do we do that? Isn't the ground dirty?"

She smiles at my quizzical face and laughs a little, “Oh well that is true, but dirt also has food in it for plants, love. In order for them to get that food, they have to grow in it. That’s why we plant the seeds in the ground; so the vegetables can grow where they can get food. ”

You may think it surprising, but it did all that made sense to me after she explained it that way. I live in a house where I can grow and have food. And these little vegetables grow in the ground where they can grow and have food. Mother seemed to explain everything so well; and she did.

After letting me wander around the garden a little while longer, she scooped me up into her arms—my favorite place to be—and we walked back around the garden, through the gate, and into the house. That small amount of time that my mother took to show me the garden and how things grew in the dirt left a large, lasting impression on my mind. I never forgot it.

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A short fiction story.
Written by,