Rectangles in the Grass

Rectangles in the Grass                          

By John W. Vander Velden

I can still see the difference in the grass, for there is a part of the lawn where rectangles are visible even today.  You see, mom loved her garden, and at one time it took up a large portion of the side lawn.  Once a place where many kinds of food stuff – potatoes, cabbages, beans, corn, cucumbers, and so many other things grew, all in straight, though not necessarily parallel, rows.  Dad would rib her how the row spacing narrowed at the far end.  Mom did not always take those gibes with a smile.

Mom’s world had been different than what we know today.  Born across the sea, a child of nine, the harsh realities of the depression and maturing in an occupied country, shaped the woman she became.  She understood the “need”.  Her family would not go hungry.  Though the farm provided the milk and meat, she grew most of the rest.

But mom loved her garden.  Perhaps she understood it as something she did well.  Perhaps she never realized just how many things she did well.  So as she lived her life, wrapped up in the “each” day, the garden was a link – a link to her past – and her contribution to the future.  Everyone needs a link like that.

Yet her garden grew more than food, for each year rows of beauty could be found there as well.  Merry Golds, Cosmos, and Zinnias made up lines of color between the deep green of healthy plants.  Bouquets found their way into our home, but most often the beauty remained in the lines of contrast among the rows of beans and lettuce.

Mom took pride in her garden.  When family friends or neighbors stopped by, they admired the weed free space, where soil, sun, and water produced.  Few left without some offering of the hours, she had toiled the soil, for mom freely shared the bounty. 

The rectangles I see are in the first earth that was her own.  When the newlywed arrived in this country the soil she worked was on borrowed space.  Tenant housing on tenant farms, yet there had always been space sufficient for a garden.  The garden was the constant in all those very different places.  As was mother hunched between the rows with her hands moving among the plants, doing the work she loved.  Mom was forty-six when we arrived at this farm – their farm, and the ownership of the land fueled her gardening to an all-time high.  

But the garden was not the farm wife’s only duties.  Caring for the family, the endless cleaning our home, and a share of farm labor filled days un-numerable.  Yet she loved her flower beds and the garden, nurturing the plants while eliminating any stray unwanted vegetation that dared to intrude.  Each of us look for that something -- that something we can use to create – and mom’s favorite canvas was the soil.

Years passed, and with that passing, the always busy woman slowly became bent.  She fought each year dad required the garden surrender a bit, for a section on its east end would vanish returning to the yard it had been in the past.  A rectangle in the grass filled the space as the tilled world of my mother shrank.  Dad’s illness reminded him – daily – that there was a time for everything, and that the time and labor mom possessed was no longer infinite.  He understood mom could not, on her own free will, cut back her work load.

Little by little the garden shrank – one rectangle after another.  But the grass – the grass in each square, similar yet not identical, reminds of the past.  You see, from the farmhouse’s kitchen window, I can see those rectangles in the grass…

(625 Words)