The summer of the garden

My 88-year-old father's health has gone downhill dramatically in the past few months, and just recently he's had to move from assisted living into a nursing home. My brother had to clear out Dad's apartment at the assisted-living facility last week and sent me many of the old photos and ephemera Dad had been keeping for all these years.

Many of the photos and documents relate to Dad's working life. But a few family photos crept into the mix. One was this favorite photo that I thought I'd lost forever. It dates from the summer of 1974. This was the year I pulled up a huge swath of lawn and planted a vegetable garden at the very first tract house in which we lived in Bellevue, Washington, a Seattle suburb.

This was the height of the back-to-nature do-it-yourself cultural trend of the 1970s. So I notice that the kids' dad is wearing the kurta-style tunic shirt that I sewed and embroidered for him. And I also sewed the little mattress ticking  pinafore top my eldest daughter is wearing. This was an era in which I learned to knit and crochet, baked homemade sourdough bread every other day, made homemade granola, sewed ballet tutus, and created the aforementioned garden. (If you want to see some of the cultural artifacts of this era, check out this website for photos of the sewing and knitting patterns we used back then. Talk about ugly!!!)

To return to the garden,  I can remember standing out in the hot sun, swinging a mattock  to break open the sod. It was some of the hardest physical work I ever did in my life.

The soil underneath was not particularly good. This part of Washington State has very rocky soil, and I can recall pulling out rocks the size of baking potatoes with almost every swing of the mattock.  But apparently I was able to amend the soil well enough go grow this good garden. My kids' dad is 6'5" and, as you can see, the sunflowers tower behind both of us.  And I remember 10-foot tall bean poles that were covered with beans; and probably the most wonderful tomatoes I have ever eaten. The cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli were less successful, mainly because of an infestation of cabbage moths whose larvae love to feed on brassicas. 

I was 30 at the time of this photo and was probably the skinniest I've ever been in my adult life. David was then seven years old, Kristin was six, Matthew was four, and Martha was on the verge of her 3rd birthday. I can tell that the photo was shot very early in the summer because, by summer's end, the boys' hair always bleached out towhead blond. The kids' dad was almost 34.

I am actually in very few family photos. That's because I was then nearly always the family photographer. Guess I learned early on that the power lies on the other side of the camera lens.

I do love this photo. We were all so young and innocent and still filled with youthful idealism. This was a summer when I'd often pile all the kids into the station wagon--of course we had a Ford station wagon with fake wood on the sides--and head off for an afternoon's hiking up along Denny Creek or strawberry picking out in the Snoqualmie Valley.

I remember that the kids loved the garden and would go out and pick--and eat--beans right off the vines. I suspect some of the tomatoes were consumed that way, too. But the one thing they all unconditionally loathed was zucchini squash. I swear they could detect one part zucchini per million in anything I cooked. I bought an all-zucchini cookbook published by the Pacific Science Center and no matter what I tried, the kids hated it. Eventually they taught Emily, our Old English Sheepdog, to dig up all the zucchini plants.

Nowadays, I grow very different edible items in my garden. I have one Eureka lemon (citrus X limon) tree, one Key or Mexican lime (Citrus aurantifolia), and a Kaffir lime (Citrus hystrix).  Two different pear trees grow in giant pots, one Comice, and the other, a d'Anjou. They seem to take turns being fruitful, for I always get a good crop on one tree each year, and almost zilch on the other.  Rosemary (Rosmarianus officinalis)  grows on half a dozen pots, and I have mint, tarragon, sage, and parsley planted here and there. Several different tomato varieties are growing in pots of pure compost, and I still have an occasional potato coming up, the result of my dumping a half dozen going bad potatoes into the compost bin last year. And a volunteer pumpkin is climbing up the fence.

I do love my garden, but I think that nothing will ever compare with this vegetable garden from the summer of 1974. Perhaps the reason it's so special in my memory is the association with my kids. Certainly a key part of my Pagan spiritual practice is connected to my garden; watching and helping things grow. But I'll never forget my kids' sense of wonder when single seeds we planted yielded flowers even taller than their father. That was big-time magic!
garden gardening Pacific+Northwest compost zucchini tomatoes family Pagan Paganism

 

Comments

[Adam]

This blog was so much fun to read. I particulary enjoyed the portion about the zucchini squash. When I'm eating mashed potatoes or macaroni and cheese, my daughter knows if there is one grain of pepper just by looking at it. Even if it is completely hidden from view, she will simply stare at it for 3 seconds and then refuse to eat it. Some kind of sixth sense I suppose.