Grandmother's Garden

Through the Window Into My Grandmother’s Garden

Exerpt from short story…

“Purple Morning Glory, the sweet smell of honeysuckle, the approach of spring, all trigger specific memories. I travel back to a simpler place and time that is my grandmother’s garden…. And I can just see her --her two elephantitus legs just a dragging through the garden at a snails pace  working, always working, --sowing the seeds that would somehow miraculously transform that garden into something spectacular--- and what a sight to behold . Her simple, organic garden overshadowed my mother’s high faluton garden only a few yards away…”

The garden was a safe haven for me, my sister Pat, Uncle Cake and Grandma. The adults worked. My sister and I PLAYED at working..  We wandered around giggling, watering plants and digging in the black earth.. Using six inch wood pegs Cake whittled, we would “ set out” cabbage and collard plants, watering the roots with our rusty tin cans.

No pretty painted watering cans were necessary for Grandma Flora Ann. A  tin- can would make due. No hoses. No faucets. Only the water from her rusted old pitcher pump supplied nourishment for the home and garden. Only a birds-eye view from the garden, that pump gushed crystal clear, cold water 24/7—Didn’t need to prime it ever.

Grandma even went a step further as she’d shovel ashes from her pot bellied stove to sling in a garden row. Claimed it “ ripened” the soil…

“Grandma had the midas touch with all things inside and outside the confines of the garden fence. Gigantic, tall and hearty were those Zinnias of hers. “Queen of Zinnia”,  I called her.  To me, Zinnias are the quintessential “old lady” flower. -- 'cause as long as I had known grandma, she was old---Eudora Welty, Miss Jane Pittman old—with the sweet smell of magnolia or jasmine, with an ever so slightly hint… of pee….”

Willie Little