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My Hands in Dirt
by Shirley Temple
I hated it. I hated the sun beating down on me, I hated the dirt under my nails, I hated the planting, the weeding and the picking of the vegetables and fruits we had so laboriously planted in the spring. I was 12 years old and I swore that when I grew up I would never have my hands in dirt again. My father laughed.
You see my father had a very large market garden and all our spare time went into that garden. In the spring we planted the potatoes, corn, tomatoes, radishes, onions and that year’s “let’s try this” crop.
We spent our weeknights and all our weekends hoeing, weeding, watering and measuring how much everything had grown. We could only take day trips for holidays because we had to be home to endlessly care for the garden. The garden seems to consume our lives from spring to fall.
Come the harvest we picked, sorted, washed and got everything ready for the market place and then we would have to get up so early and stand all day with our goods and hope that everything would sell or we would be eating it every night for the next week. My mother worked endless hours putting everything extra or not perfect down in bottles and jars for the winter. She baked countless pies for the freezer from the apples we grew in our orchard.
That was my gardening experience when I was growing up. When I married and my husband suggested a garden I told him I would have no part of it. But I found myself grabbing handfuls of the soil and squeezing it. I would hear my voice suggesting certain kinds of tomatoes that I knew would do well. As the season progressed I would comment on how much it had grown that week and how wonderful the tomatoes and corn smelled. With the corn cob to my nose I could see my father in the field, peeling back the husk and inhaling. “It’s ready now” he would say and we would pick an armload and run to the house where my mother would shuck and boil it right then and my father and I would eat corn until we couldn’t swallow another buttery bite.
I decided that a flower garden wouldn’t really be gardening, and so I purchased my plants and once more got my hands dirty. I knelt in the garden, the sun on my back and I cried. I cried for my father who had passed away years ago and who had instilled in me this love of earth and sun. I missed him and the time that we had spent in the garden. I missed “our time”. I suddenly realized that I had learned so much while we were working together and it wasn’t always about plants that we had talked. We had discussed school, and friend’s betrayals, upcoming parties, and boys.
As my children grew they would find me in my ever increasing gardens, and would ask if they could plant something and watch it grow. I would smile, but inside I could hear my father laughing. He knew; all the old ways that he had taught me were brand new bridges I would use to talk to my children, to encourage their confidence and instil in them love for their surroundings. Now every time I see my children, my nieces or grandnieces kneel and dig into the soil I see my father, his arm resting on the handle of a hoe, the sun silhouetting his figure and I am so thankful for the heritage that was given to me to pass on.
Like one of his many plants I have grown and flourished because his love and teachings were planted in me like a seed to grow from the ground up.
Please Note: The story above was entered into the OHA Creative Writing 2011 Competition in Class 3 at the 2011 Convention in Sudbury: Story—”A Growing Experience—from the Ground Up.” It earned 2nd prize. Congratulations Shirley! (2011-12-03) |
