Grubbing in the dirt and thinking of my father: the two are inexorably entwined in my mind. My father was an ace gardener: a man ahead of his time, reading and putting into practice principles from Organic Gardening magazine and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring during those environmentally unfriendly DDT years. And, sometimes to my horror, he also wasn’t afraid to experiment with what then were considered-to-be-exotic plants. I was the first kid on the block, possibly in my whole neighborhood, to be treated to yellow tomatoes and spaghetti squash. Oh, joy! But, on good days for me, he would allow me to “help” him with simple gardening tasks and even allotted me a small plot for my own to grow annuals of my choosing. Although I was skeptical of his wanderings into weird-vegetable-land, on my knees beside him in the dirt I thought that I had died and gone to heaven!
In our allegedly adult years, my friend Patsy and I have talked about how, as girls, we much preferred spending time with our “Sainted Daddies” than with our mothers. With rearview-mirror vision, it is clear why. It wasn’t totally that Daddy/Daughter thing, although that probably figured into the equation. We didn’t love our mothers less and our fathers more. Rather, our mothers were inside the house cleaning, and cooking, and mending: those 1950’s-Mother things. It was pretty clear that we were going to be expected to have those items on our agenda for the rest of our lives. So right then, we wanted to be with our fathers in the yard grubbing in the dirt or in the garage messing with power tools. Which of these sets of activities was more interesting was a no-brainer!
Also, on really special days, there were field trips to the hardware store: purveyors of seeds, nursery stock and greasy, unidentifiable-to-us-then mechanical things. Built on those memories, I still love going to hardware stores. The vastness of the inventory is astonishing; just walking through and looking can fill an entire evening. Makes me a “cheap date,” according to Larry.
My father was far less chatty than I, so, as it works with those quiet people, when an opinion was offered, generally it stuck in memory. Not a church-going man, he once commented to me that he didn’t see how anyone who gardened could not believe in a higher power. His observation embedded itself in my brain. Thus, having at least partially fulfilled my destiny of being in the house doing those “woman things,” one year I made him a sampler that bears a clump of stylized flowers and the sing-songy, poetic legend: “Who Plants a Seed Beneath the Sod and Waits To See Believes in God.” Might be a bit sappy, but his “little girl” had made it for him, so in that Daddy/Daughter-thing way, he was touched that I had remembered his remark. Following his journey to that big garden in the hereafter, that piece of needlework came back to me and now hangs beside the door that I often use on my way outside to work in the garden. I glance at it and it calls to mind my “Sainted Daddy” as I go outdoors to engage in far-less-skilled-than-he gardening activities. (I couldn’t be programmed totally only to do that in-the-house-stuff, though. In addition to still grubbing in the dirt, and now that I know what a lot of them are, I sometimes mess with greasy mechanical things too. A maintenance person once said to me, “You sure know a lot about maintenance for a woman:” a tribute to my father and a proud moment for me.)
So, as Father’s Day and the gardening season take center stage, and we go outdoors to grub in the dirt, raise a trowel and give a shout out to all those “Sainted Daddy” gardeners everywhere.