“On my walk yesterday I saw a pile of broken bones and fur at the side of the road.” I pulled at a clump of dandelions. “It looked old, but you could still see the fawn’s head in the middle of them.”
Grace wiped the back of her wrist across her forehead and stood up. “That’s sad.”
“The fur had white spots in it.”
“I finished this row. Okay if I go in?”
“Yeah, of course. Thanks for helping.” Mom never would’ve let me go after one row.
But this was even less Grace’s plot of earth than it was mine. Children can eat from their grandparents’ garden without the responsibility of its upkeep.
The dandelion’s fat tap root would not let go of the ground. Even the rain shower that lingered over the house all through the night didn’t soften the earth enough to make the roots pullable. The top of the white tuber peaked just millimeters out of the ground before its green stalks broke above it. I came away with a handful of leaves, flowers, and seedheads, and the tuber slipped back under the black soil, already sucking up the nutrients it needed to regenerate.
“Your dad doesn’t weed,” Mom told me over the phone in the spring, with a tongue-cluck, when he did this year’s planting. “I just can’t anymore.”
I came home and found your mom standing on the front porch, Dad told me in February. Just standing there. Said she couldn’t move or she’d fall.
I saw it this visit, the sudden stopping, like she forgot how her legs worked. Or maybe she’d been stricken with fear that they’d refuse to do what she wanted them to, and she’d go down.
Had she taken a fall once? I couldn’t remember.
Grace and I had come out to help Dad pick peas. The pea plants formed two jumbled rows, humped over themselves in strange clusters. Their climbing tendrils had nothing to grasp but themselves and their own stems and leaves. No fence or trellis had been staked. Dad sat on an overturned bucket in shorts and a white T-shirt, his sausage-thick fingers poking around in the mess of sprawling, clumped plants. His perennially sunburned forearms—purple and brown sleeves of leather—sprouted a new melanoma every few months. He went inside the house with a quarter-filled tub of pea pods.
Alone now, I started on the waist-high nutsedge that surrounded and infiltrated the tomato patch.
A weed is but an unloved flower.
I once read that on a plaque in a kitschy souvenir shop. I bought the plaque.
As I broke the unloved flowers’ tops off their unyielding roots and threw them aside, green globes of unripe tomatoes appeared on the lower branches of the fuzzy tomato stems. “You’ll do better without having to fight for sunlight,” I told them. My fingers trailed softly over one of the firm, hairy stalks, and I breathed in the crisp, veridian scent that only tomato plants make.
The tomato plant releases its unique odor from the moment the tender seedling emerges from the soil until, tall and gangly, the exhausted plant dies. Sometimes you can still smell it on your hands when you pull their dry skeletons up and put the garden to bed for the winter, already planning how you’d make a better garden next year.
Luke’s footsteps came around the side of the garage, toward the fenced garden. That boy grows like a weed, Dad used to say. Luke finally stopped growing two years ago, at six feet and three inches. My child towered over the rest of the family. “Come to help?” I asked, knowing perfectly well he did not.
“Grandma says you should come in.”
“What for?”
“She said you shouldn’t worry about the weeds.”
Since when?
“Look at this.” I waved a hand across the sparse, poorly tended plot. “Grandma and Poppa always had big, beautiful gardens. They put up tons of vegetables every year, canning and freezing and drying.”
“Okay.”
“The garden needs attention.”
Please stay and help me. Please show your grandparents that you’re not spoiled. That you care about your mom working all alone in the sun.
Once, while I was making dinner and Luke lay in his usual place on the couch, cradling his tablet against his knees, Dad told me, No one sat down until Mother sat down. If Mother was working, everybody was working.
“I’m just telling you what Grandma said.”
“Help me for a few minutes?”
“No thanks.” He turned on his heel and his size-twelve feet carried him back to where he really wanted to be. “Love you,” he called over his shoulder.
I think we raise ourselves.
This year’s garden had only tomatoes and peas, two sprawling zucchini plants and a circular cluster of beets.
God in heaven, I hated beets. When Mom canned pickled beets, I had to leave the house for the day.
One year during beets, she told me to put a saddle on Betsy and take her for a ride, so I did. I was nine. I couldn’t control that horse. Betsy wanted to go down the road, turn left at the four-lane highway that linked the two nearest towns, and go half a mile north, to the farm where she’d spend months each year with the family who took her to shows along with their own horses. She’d gotten into the field with their stud one year, and ended up pregnant. The hussy. Her foal lived two days, then died of a birth defect.
Whether Betsy wanted to go back to see the family or to see that stud again, I had no idea, but she wouldn’t turn around, hard as I pulled on her reins. She stepped onto the highway, and for a few minutes plodded, neck set forward, along the berm. But then she spooked and bolted. My scrawny legs clamped against her heaving sides and my white-knuckled hands yanked back on the reins as hard as my prepubescent arms could. But she galloped down the blur of the yellow-dotted line. Her hard hooves pounded ka-thunka-ka-thunka-ka-thunka on the hot asphalt, knocking through my hip bones and spinal column as cars and trucks honked and peeled left and right.
Your life does flash before your eyes when you think you’re about to die. I saw all nine years—every single memory I had—run like a high-speed video in my field of vision during those few seconds that felt like hours. I remembered things I’d forgotten ever happened.
Betsy swerved onto the road she wanted to go down. Her second family and the stud lived at the end. A car with a young man and woman pulled around us and cut Betsy off. He held her reins while the woman helped me down from the saddle. She took me inside the nearest house and I called home.
“I can’t come right now! I’m canning. Just ride Betsy home.”
I protested that I couldn’t. That I couldn’t control her. That Betsy wouldn’t go home, that she wanted to go to the Tatmans’ place. Betsy was a full-sized horse and I was a three-quarters-sized person. I tried to convey the truth and terror of riding a runaway mare down the middle of a highway, certain I was about to die, rolled and crushed with Betsy under a semi-trailer.
Mom slammed down the phone.
She came with the pickup truck, tied Betsy to the trailer hitch, and drove home on the shoulder. I’d ruined the whole batch of canning, because she had to stop and take the jars off the stove before they’d boiled long enough to seal. We sat in the crawling vehicle in cold silence.
I didn’t die but the vegetables did and that was unforgivable.
Some years later I bolted down other highways and found my own stud.
Tula came through the garden gate.
“Close that behind you,” I said, “so animals don’t get in.”
“Which ones are weeds and which ones are plants?” she asked.
I pointed her to a patch of towering black medic. “You can pull all of that and throw it over the fence.”
She ran her hand over the clusters of yellow blooms. “But it’s so pretty. Are you sure Grandma didn’t plant this for flowers?”
“I’m sure. Don’t scatter the seeds,” I warned her. “They’ll come back again.”
“I’m going to keep some for a bouquet. We’ll put it on the table in the kitchen.”
Once I made a little nosegay of dandelions. I liked their thick, soft, sunny flowers.
Don’t put those weeds on the table.
“I’m sure Grandma will love them if they’re from you,” I told Tula.
The state of my parents’ garden broke my heart.
Maybe next summer I can come for longer. Tula will have her driver’s license and Grace may stay at college for the summer if she gets that job. I could help Mom and Dad plant the garden, and keep it weeded.
“I don’t like that we’re killing living things,” Tula said.
“Weeds keep the plants from thriving.”
“Aren’t the weeds plants too? Who decided they’re worth less?”
“They don’t make anything useful, like fruits or vegetables.”
“Luke isn’t useful, but you keep him around,” she muttered. She selected a wide handful of stalks. “I’m taking these flowers in.”
Yes, next summer I can get away, for the first time in over twenty years, drive the ten hours, and help Mom and Dad. Luke will be married. Sean and Tula can do without me for a couple of months.
Grace came back out. “Grandma says you should come in. She wants you to have a sandwich. It’s lunch time.”
“Tell her I’ll be there when I finish.”
“She doesn’t want you in the garden. She says it’s too much.”
“Someone has to do it.”
“Seriously, Mom. Why does it matter? They can buy food at the grocery.”
“That isn’t the point.”
She put a fist on her hip. “Then what is the point?”
“Someday you’ll understand.”
“I’m never having a garden. I’m going to live in the city.”
Grace abandoned me for the second time.
I moved toward the zucchini patch and worked there until I heard footsteps again.
Mom put one hand on the top of the fence and hung her cane over it. “You don’t have to do this,” she said.
“It’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s good to get my hands dirty.”
She watched me work and we didn’t talk. I couldn’t think of anything to say that she didn’t already know.
“If you don’t get the roots, they’ll just come back,” she said.
“I know. I’m doing the best I can. The earth is hard.”
I kept weeding. Mom didn’t leave. I worked in a circle around the beets, leaving a trail of broken stems behind me.
“I’m sorry it’s like this.”
“I know.”
Maria Keffler is a high school English and psychology teacher who lives in Arlington, VA. Her husband says she has a knitting and crochet addiction, but Maria insists that she can quit anytime she wants to. She just doesn’t want to. Maria also enjoys baking anything with sugar and flour in it, and has begun to spin her own yarn to feed her addiction.
© 2024, Maria Keffler
Halfway Down the Stairs 