The Victory of Gardens
Image by Clay Banks
My first and only garden was in 1944. That was the year of D-Day at Normandy. Of course, being a boy of six, I didn’t know much about that though, of course, I did know there was a war. The spirit of the time permeated the air and our parents’ conversations, so my garden was more than just a plain, ol’ garden; it was a victory garden – more than that, even. It was what living in the dairy country of Inverness was all about. We would get milk from the dairy farms, with the cream on top! And oh, so thick you had to ladle it with a spoon! Sometimes it was so thick the spoon would stand up!
My Dad hung my swing from a branch of the tree in our front yard, and I would swing soooooooooooooo high, always being sure to keep my legs stiff and straight before me so that the thorns of the black berry bushes would not gash me when I swung over it.
I learned how to pick the berries without gouging myself – I mean, they really made me bleed! – and I found out how to tell the really ripe berries, bursting a blood-black color that had to be picked right now! Like Pooh Bear, I would gorge myself on them, and my hands would be all juicy blue-black – and of course, my shirt. The ones not yet ready to pick or eat had red or green in them, and the green ones you left for later. They were hard and bitter. The ripe ones that did manage to get onto the table were so sweet in the dairy cream that you didn’t have to use any sugar.
The victory garden was a victory for my Mother, of course, because I loved the light and dark greens of the leaves transparent in the sun, and the corn taller than I, and the squashes squiggling on their vines; there is absolutely nothing so tasty as lettuce picked five minutes before you put it into a salad. And all those other green plants too. I never thought of them as vegetables, and My Mother never said the V-word. That’s probably why I loved eating them.
And onions! Onions don’t look like the onions people see in the store; they look like long, thin, green stalks poking out of the ground. The round, tart part that stings our eyes is the bulb. You don’t see that until you pull it out of the ground, and when I did and brought it into the house, it never made me cry, and there was no sharp taste because an onion fresh out of the ground is sweet.
And the tomatoes! O my God, the tomatoes! People today don’t know what the word ‘tomato’ means. They think tomatoes are those hard globules that have no flavor. I see people testing them, you know, squeezing them, as if that will soften them. It won’t. You can squeeze yourself drier than a used toothpaste tube and those things will never, never ripen. They’ll stay as hard as the farmers’ hearts who pick them green and ship them in trucks bumping along the roads, but no matter how big the bumps, the road is never rough enough to crush them. Poor city slickers, doomed – or is it damned – to put those neverripe things into their mouths, never to know the joyful SQUISH of a REAL Tomato! Neverripe – that’s one word meaning those shiny, waxed, red round things in supermarkets – tasteless! Neverripe. Spelled n-e-v-e-double R-i-p-e.
Ripe tomatoes are called riperiperipeomiGooooood- spelled g-double o-double o-double o-double o-d! pronounced Good or God – both meaning the same thing, so very hard to say when your mouth is crammed with a tomato whose juice runs down your chin and onto your shirt, staining it foreverrrrrrrrrrr, but you don’t care and you take another bite and it goes squish and pop! and oooosshes down your chin and your shirt again, and once in a while, when you are six years old with other six-year-old boys, you throw one and watch with great glee as it goes splat! on your friend’s shirt – and it is a wonder he’s still your friend, but then you know why when he splats! you because it is so much fun until your Mother comes flying through the screen door that always, always bangs and yells at you to stop wasting food, there’s a war on!
Yes, there was a war on, and there have been five more since then; that’s a total of six since I was six. I’m glad I had my victory garden. Like Hamlet who knew ‘a hawk from a handsaw,’ I know where milk comes from and what a tomato and lettuce fresh from the earth taste like, and I know blackberries ripe from their thorny bush; I know the fulfillment of eating what you have planted. When you eat what you have planted, you are literally eating the truth, not what someone tells you is the truth. There is no truth in a hard-as-a-rock tomato, a sour cucumber, a mealy ear of corn, and certainly not in the egregious corporate lie of GMO foods – a venomous oxymoron meaning Getting Mucked Over.
I know a garden requires patience, patience to plant, to let grow, and to choose what is ripe to eat. You cannot do that in a hurry. You have to slow down. You have to allow. Gardens don’t lie. That is the true victory of gardens.