Discovery
Near the end of the spring planting season, I purchased a couple of cucumber plants and set them in a flower bed under my kitchen window. I didn't expect much -- never do from cucumber plants because of the excess shade in my gardening area. However, this year I have been pleasantly surprised. I've harvested four lovely plump, delicious cucumbers which I've eaten in raw chunks accompanied by chilled glasses of champagne and the company of friends.
Years ago I read a report in a literary magazine from a writer visiting a poet in Soviet Russia. The poet produced chilled bottles of beer then ran out of the house to the street market returning with cucumbers and tomatoes. They drank their dark Russian beer with cucumber and tomato chunks and furthered releasing the grasp of oppressive governments on freedom of speech.
It's sort of odd the things that stay with us, the simple things that make for lasting impressions, like the comical vision of my father wearing a pith helmet, plaid bermudas and hip boots as he worked in our garden in Western Washington. He sang while he worked, sea chanties and old songs like "Juanita". To this day, I associate those songs with cucumbers, string beans and carrots. I save the corn memories for Shane, my sister's horse, who desimated the corn patch the morning my father left on another of many sea voyages. We never told him.
This week is the anniversary of my baby sister's death two years ago from a long miserable bout of cancer. I remember her gardens, a lush one in Wenatchee, Washington: summer squash by the bushel and fresh blueberry jam. Her last garden was a zen garden in the backyard of her new house in Twin Falls, Idaho. She was always meticulous about her spaces, and her loved ones knew it was the end when the garden's edges became shaggy, then overgrown, then choked with weeds like her body.
Humans are more like plants than we admit. We do, afterall, desire to set out roots and harvest friends and lovers. We return to the earth, compost, fertilize the future.