Part IV: Spin – God’s Wild Children: #2 (Chapter 74)
Nana’s vegetable garden, a careless patch of green about eight feet by eight feet with zig-zag rows, produced enough asparagus, tomatoes, green beans, wax beans, zucchini, and sweet peas to get us through Summer and part of Autumn.
Nana hated gardening, viewing it as a civic duty,
an on-going chore the women in her neighborhood did because of growing up poor
on Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota farms.
Although Nana fell into lockstep with her
neighbors and planted the correct seeds, she, unlike the other women who
cultivated, weeded, thinned, and hoed their rows until the first frost, would
do just the minimum, enough to give the seedlings a head start.
Then she allowed nature to take its course.
Nana must have had the ultimate green thumb
because most of her plants thrived, always bearing copious amounts of bounty – a
Garden of Eden of sorts, where weeds co-existed with cultivated plants. Even
the more delicate plants shared their root systems with the hardier ones:
dandelions, young hollyhocks, mustard, goldenrod, red clover, sneezeweed, great
plantain, and, at least once, bull thistle in full flower, towering over the
tomato plants.
“It’s too pretty to pull,” she said when Pappa
pointed out the offending weed.
“It does a garden good to compete with God’s wild
children.”
The thistle stayed until first frost, when, I
suspect, Pappa pulled the tenacious plant and poured weed killer into the hole.
Now, as we walked between the rows of disarray, I
showed Danny how to choose the tomatoes that were ready for eating.
“The ripe ones will practically fall off the
vine.”
Danny grabbed at one red tomato, but it wouldn’t
budge. He twisted it, snapping it off the vine.
“No!” I yelled. “That’s not right! You can’t force
it.”
“It looks ready.” Danny rolled the tomato around
in his hands.
“It just looks
that way.” My hands on hips. “But it’s not.”
Danny tossed the tomato into the air and caught it
just before it hit the ground. “Whoa!” Up in the air again and down, rescued a
second time just before impact.
“Stop it now before Nana sees you.”
“It’s just an old tomato you can’t even eat,” he
said, dropping it into the bowl.
“Put it in the window a few days, and you can, so
there.”
I pointed at a big blood-red tomato, the kind that
has grown so fast that it bulges and creases at the stem. “There’s a ripe one.”
Danny ran through the patch and touched the tomato; it fell to the ground and split wide open, its juices oozing into the earth.
“You dummy!” I yelled. “Now look what you’ve
done!”
“Girls,” Danny muttered as he picked up the ruined
tomato and took a bite. He slurped tomato juice through his teeth.
“Umm-mmm-mm...”
What a creep!
