Madison123

here at the front porch,” she says,
pointing toward the door.
My grandfather chimes in from his
chair across the room. “Real, or fake?”
he asks, and my grandmother laughs
in response. They’re fake silk flowers
buried in the real dirt, and they bloom
year-round.
“You’d think with all the time I’ve put
in it, I would have a better garden than
what I turn out to have,” she says. “I just
really haven’t had space anywhere that
I’ve lived to have very much of a garden,
you know.”
My grandmother, who was named
Willie after her grandmother and Ruth
after her mother, grew up in the garden.
Born in southern Alabama but raised in
central Mississippi, she lived with her
family on property owned by the man
they raised crops for. In the small family
garden by their home, she helped by
shelling peas, and they lived off what
they could grow.
The first garden of her own was in
the backyard of her home on Lawrence
Road in Jackson, Mississippi. There, she
raised two daughters and lived for nearly
forty years. During the weekdays, she
worked in the daycare at their church,
Briarwood Baptist, taking care of
three-year-olds who called her “Miss
Roofie.” Her vegetable garden sat across
the length of the yard’s left edge, and
carefully planted wildflowers ran down
the other two sides of the chain-link
fence. In the center of the yard sat an
old peach tree covered in fine mesh to
keep out squirrels, and two silver metal
clothesline posts. In the summer, sunlight
made its way through the canopy of the
giant, ancient oak trees that dotted the
old neighborhood.
When they moved to the trailer in
2005, they dug up the concrete
stepping-stone that sat in front of the
gardening shed in the backyard and took
it with them. It had my mother’s name,
Debra Henderson, engraved into the
wet cement with a pointer finger, and
the year, 1968.
In the new home, my grandmother
immediately picked the best spots for
her new garden, which flanked the trailer
home on opposite ends. My uncle tilled
up the soil for her, and she set to work.
When it got harder for her to walk down
the steps and across the yard, we got her
the motorized wheelchair. After this,
she put her trowel and gardening claw
in the chair’s side pocket and began
dragging the watering hose behind her
across the yard.
At the end of every autumn, she
would say that season was her last to
work in the dirt. “I’m not doing a garden
next year,” she would tell us. We bought
her the most realistic-looking silk flowers
we could find, and she planted them by
the mailbox and in hanging baskets
along the back porch. But one Sunday
afternoon each spring, we would pull up
in the gravel driveway to see freshlytilled
earth, tree branches serving as bean
poles, and evenly-spaced mounds of dirt
with tiny green sprouts breaking free.
One particular Sunday, while sitting
in the living room as a brightly-colored
NASCAR race swirled silently around
on the TV, I asked her what it is about
gardening that she likes so much.
“I don’t know,” she said, laughing.
“I just do.” Sitting in her recliner, she is
wearing two pairs of fuzzy pink socks as
well as house shoes, and her feet barely
touch the floor. “I just like to go outside.
I could stay out there all day.” With this,
she pauses and turns to my grandfather,
who is nodding off in his own chair.
“Couldn’t I, Shelton?” she asks him.
He picked his head up and doesn’t miss
a beat. “You do,” he responds. “You do
that sometimes.” He tells us that when
the weather is good, she’ll go out at ten
and won’t come back in until two or three.
“I like to do butter beans…” she says,
looking off in the distance. “I like to have
butter beans, and okra, and tomatoes,
and squash–which I don’t have good
luck with, squash.” She continues,
“Onions, strawberries, blueberries…
peach trees, pear trees, plum trees. If
they’re good plums, they’re about like
that,” she says, holding up her fingers
to show an imaginary, golfball-sized
piece of fruit. “This past year I didn’t
have good plums because half of it….
Well, I only had half a plum each.”
That year, she carefully picked each
plum, half not quite ripe, the other half
already turning bad. Setting them in
her lap on the wheelchair, she brought
the small pile into the house each day.
She would then carefully peel each piece
of fruit, keeping only the parts that were
good. Little by little, she amassed enough
that summer to make a few jars of jelly,
which she gave to us.
“There are some vegetables that just
take too much time to plant and peel,
Mama,” my mother always told her.
“You can buy them at the store and
they taste just as good.”
“Yeah, but I still wanna’ put ‘em up,”
she said, laughing.
During my sophomore year in
college, I came home for the summer
determined to grow my own garden in
the backyard. I purchased several seed
packets at the local yard and garden
center: giant sunflowers, heirloom
tomatoes, California poppies, dark green
cucumbers. I planted the seeds in egg
cartons filled with soil and watched
them peek out of the dirt, their tiny green
bodies stretching toward the kitchen
window’s sun.
In the heat of June, I used a longhandled
shovel to break up the hard
Mississippi clay and mixed it with new,
rich, black soil, burying the roots of
each sprout an even six-inches apart.
I punctured the dirt with the ends of
freshly-pruned crepe myrtle branches
42 • JANUARY 2023 Originally published April 2019