What I wish I had known...
He stoops over endless green rows, my suburban son, fingers parting frilled leaves where I direct, and exclaims at the unveiling of glowing red satin beneath.
"Strawberries!"
And it's magic, seeing knowledge dawn, seeing one immersed in things made by man connect to a Thing made by God. His little bird-voice chirps excited. "Look, mama! Strawberries! They're on the plants, look, look!"
I show him how to cradle a fragrant ruby berry between two fingers and tug it away. His usual exuberance results in bruises, juice running red down his hand. I remember, remember, the summer-warm sweetness of a strawberry seconds from its veins, and wonder if it will be anything like the same for him.
He takes a bite, looks thoughtful. "Mmmmmm." I beam.
Minutes later, he is making matchbox car tracks through the dust at the end of the rows, and I am left wondering, amused, where I went wrong.
But memories remind me. From eleven to fifteen I lived on an acre in the Mississippi Delta, land so rich a dead stick, planted, just might sprout. We had a garden, huge, in earth pulled from a thousand miles of ancient riverbank and settled there, virile beside our house. We grew turnips the size of cantaloupes, bushels of corn, tomatoes like clusters of miniature suns, barrels of cucumbers, okra and spinach and radishes and lettuce and onions and purple-hulled peas that filled two freezers and fed us health all year long.
And I hated it.
Hated the dry-cracked rasp of dirt on hands and under fingernails, the scratching blades of cornstalk, the pollen-fuzz seeping under collar and down the sweat-soaked back, the scorching sun on cracked earth and the strength spent wrestling with a mile of hose to bring the life-water, the hours waiting for the water to reach the end of a row so that the hose might move on to the next. I hated the green-sweet smell, the strained neck and stained fingers after hours of shelling peas in the evenings after dinner. Hated trudging behind a tractor, arms jerking with the effort of steadying a plow as it sliced through the packed earth. Hated the disgusting smush of worm-eaten corn under my fingers when I came upon a bad ear while shucking. Hated the work.
Why is it we never appreciate the right things?
Do children who grow up on farms, who never know any other life but the plowing and tilling and harvest, who sense that their family's livelihood breathes with the planet's own life - do they long to live where the only outdoor work is a weekly lawn-mowing (easily hired out), and preparing food, if you aren't picky, requires little more effort than it takes to get from store to freezer to microwave?
Here I am, now, years from fifteen, miles from fertile earth - and I find in myself a yearning to return to that place. To realize, with the benefit of hindsight, that to bring forth food by the sweat of one's brow is a blessing more than a curse. To know this kind of work is good, it is honest, it is Real.
So I dig up my backyard, stubborn. I scrape away the sand and clay and I pay for dirt to be trucked in. I recover kitchen waste thrown into the garbage by forgetful husband and add it to the compost pile and I dream of turnips the size of canteloupes, tomatoes like clusters of suns.
I don't even like tomatoes.
I poke holes for my son to drop the wrinkled pregnant seeds and rejoice when baby greens push through the soil in Spring. I weep and curse the sub-tropic air when they wither and die in midsummer blight. I plant again in Fall, and I learn, trial by trial.
I call him from his matchbox cars and insist that he pick more berries. He whines complaint, put off by the itchy fuzz of the underside of the leaves. But I make him fill a quart-basket, because I want my children to know work. I want to surround them with Real. So that, just maybe, it will not take them thirty years to appreciate it.
