'Went to a garden party just to see who was there

If I were to undergo DNA testing I wonder if geneticists would discover a gardening gene within my make-up.  If so, the gardening gene would be two recessive genes that have been made manifest within me.  Let me explain.  I enjoy gardening and growing things in the soil.  The growing warmth of May triggered something within me that calls me to dig in the dirt.  But, I am fussy—the weather has to be warm.

Both my grandmothers were avid gardeners.  They raised families when it was necessary to have a garden to feed the family.  My Grandma Mary had seven children within thirteen years.  Her feeding that many children required her having a large garden to be in charge of  The boys were working in the field and the girls would be hoeing the garden. (I almost forgot, Uncle Dave had to practice the piano.) Not surprisingly, none of my aunts were gardeners in their mother’s footsteps.

 My Grandma Lindsay also was from that era when they canned everything that would fit in a jar. But even when she was all alone, Grandma Bessie would stand upside-down in the blazing sun pulling the errant weeds that were so foolish as to rise above the soil. She had the benefit of a garden made up of sandy loam, a gardener’s dream.  The soil was enriched with magical, composted manure brought to town each spring from the farm produced by proud, registered Holsteins.  What I inherited from Grandma Lindsay was the joy of growing flowers.

The gene skipped a generation.  Gardening, according to my father, involved a John Deere pulling a moldboard plow, the larger the better.  For my mother, she had “done her time” as a young girl and had no plans of going down that path of purgatory again.  A few petunias in a planter were satisfactory.  It appeared to be a pact to which she and her sisters all subscribed.

Then, I married a woman with a dominant gene for gardening.  Together, we discovered our mutual admiration for perennials, those deep rooted plants that return year after year.  Each house that we have lived in has been left with the posterity of our gardening presence. The purchaser of one house subsequently sprayed Round-up on the perennial bed we had cultivated eradicating all those noxious plantings.

During my tenure at Home Depot during a furlough from interim ministry, I would often be the cashier in the garden area.  I dispensed a lot of free gardening information to customers for which I was not compensated.  Should I have submitted a statement for consultation fees?

As I write this, I am returning from a week’s vacation.  Much of the time was spent with duties such as spreading back dirt into the newly edged beds, planting annuals as borders, potting planters, perpetually mowing grass, and waging war against quack grass (quack, it is suspected, is a communist plot).  My muscles ached.  I missed applying sunscreen to some spots.  My fingernails were embedded with dirt and, as the saying goes, I was happier than a toad in hell.

There are no plans to go “pro” when and if we retire, but we will surely continue to putter as long as we are upright.  I may need a crane to get me up but let me dig.  We will unapologetically beg for divisions of perennials.  We will play with combinations of colors and textures.  We will keep amending our soil.

Then, someday all that soil will be shoveled on top of me and I can be at one with the soil I have tilled, the soil I have hoed, and the soil I have cussed.