Grace in the Garden: Grandmother's Love

To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven... If it weren't for winter's cold and gray, I don't suppose Springtime would be as warm and bright. How much better my life is when I rejoice in the sure promise of what's to come, and see past the momentary chills and gray skies of the present! Since I was a little guy, lots of friends would talk about being excited to see all the toys and stuff in the new Sears and Roebuck catalog that always came out before Christmas each year. For me, the highlight of the year (literally!!) was the day that kraft paper-wrapped full color catalog arrived in the mailbox from the Walter Atlee Burpee Seed Company. I would take it and sprawl out on the floor in a room all by myself and savor every picture and every word. From Burpee, I learned what Celeriac is (not a disease, but a really tasty root vegetable! I first ate it in Germany, but now we cook it often at home.) I learned about growing zones defined by the Department of Agriculture, and which plants were hardy in certain areas and which were not. I learned about grafting, budding, cross-pollination, how hybrids were created and how grower select for specific traits. I memorized the scientific names of hundreds of vegetables, flowers and fruits, almost all of which I can still recall off the top of my head to this day. I read about exotic species from the far corners of the globe, and wondered if some day I would travel to those places, too. THEN, I would take the catalog very carefully (I became quite upset if anyone wrinkled it, or wrote on the cover!)--I would carefully take it with me to my grandparents' house, where my grandmother Hawkins would sit down with me on the couch in the den and lovingly re-read the entire thing, with one of her strong arms around me. We ooo'd and ahh'd and plotted and planned, making a list of all the seed we'd order and planning what amounted to a majority of the food we'd eat in the coming year. When the seeds came, I would plant them with care and tend them in a coldframe my Dad built for me when I was in elementary school (I was in 6th grade when I got my first greenhouse; two more would follow, the current one 28 x 40 feet). I planted them carefully, tomatoes and peppers and eggplant always in clay pots because they held moisture better and because they retained heat best in the coldframe, as they had to be started in January, long before the fast-growers like squash and cucumber, which I raised in peat pots and planted just a few weeks before they would be planted out in the big garden at my grandparents, the garden plot that sat where a fort once protected the first settlers from thieves and natives on their trek Westward. Having learned from the Burpee catalog and from James Underwood Crockett's 'Victory Garden' books that one always plants two seeds per pot, I would agonize when the day came to snuff out the weaker of the two seedlings then, steeling my nerve, carefully snip the runt, leaving the stronger contender to grow proud and strong before assuming its rightful place in the garden row. I loved my Grandmother Hawkins dearly. I loved everything about her: how every time I stepped into her kitchen through the carport door, she would hug me: not a 'forearm hug', not a pat on the back—no, my Grandmother gave great huge, full-body hugs—the kind you only get from a large, bosomy woman who loves you so much she envelopes you and practically suffocates you in the process of expressing it. Of the many, many people who have influenced my life, I think often of the gifts I received from Grandmother. I'm not referring to material gifts, but to those gifts that touch spirit and character and soul, often given unawares and likewise received. Such gifts are of things like so many things in life, better caught than taught; and they often work like timed-release capsules, yielding their results in our lives subtly and gently and gradually, yet often with considerably more impact and success than any effort to forcibly “inject” character, manners or empathy. One of the great things about love is that while each of us knows it when we experience it, no one—scientist, poet or philosopher—can define it, manufacture it or create a formula to teach it to others. Love is unique for each of us, and each of us defines what it looks like and feels like, based largely on some set of past experiences. In many ways, it's like the presence of the Holy Spirit: I can't tell you how it will feel for you, nor even a set of absolute traits by which it can be identified; but I know without doubt when He is moving in me. For me, the moments that define love are many, and a number of them revolve around my Grandmother: those giant embraces which seemed at times like a caress from a grizzly bear, but I longed for them so much! the times spent poring over the Burpee catalog; the shared savoring of the feel of warm, soft Carolina clay earth in our hands as we planted my lovingly-grown peppers and tomatoes together; the won't-take-'no'-for-an-answer love that would wrestle a good-sized kid to the floor, if necessary, to feed him one more chicken leg or piece of chocolate cake. And then there was the watermelon! When I was young, we all did a bit of farming in our family: my dad raised beef cattle, my uncles hogs and chickens. My cousin had turkeys and he and my brother used to show ponies which, along with my Dad's Tennessee walking horses and a revolving assortment of other critters, inhabited my Granddad's property. And we all raised a garden! One big, sprawling patch of ground, anchored by a wizened old Bartlett pair tree with a partially hollow trunk. When you farm, the calendar is marked not with greeting-card holidays or the days of patron saints, but with the cycle of tilling and planting and tending and harvesting, a cycle that no doubt marked Adam's primeval calendar, as well. It was all fun—I loved every part, but the very best was harvesting, which usually came in the evening, the pear tree's shade bringing welcome respite from the day's work of bailing and loading hay. And of all our produce, none was more welcome—whether homegrown, storebought or bartered, than the first watermelon of Summer. In my Grandmother's mind, no melon could possibly be fit for consumption until the first day of July; and so, I waited impatiently for that arbitrary moment when Grandmother and I would sit down alone at the rough concrete picnic table in her yard with the enormous fruit that had inhabited my dreams through Winter's snow and April's rain, taunting me day-by-day until, to borrow the words of Holy Scripture, “...in the fullness of time...” it was ready for consumption. Four things occupied that concrete table, like the obscure evidence in a Raymond Chandler detective novel: the fruit itself, chosen for its mottled appearance, hollow 'thump' when palpated with the fleshy heel of my Grandmother's palm, the absence of either a stem or the little disk of tissue to which the stem would be attached (very important, because melons don't ripen after picking!), and for it's belly. The successful candidate for First Melon of the Season must be possessed of a belly flat (but not concave), slightly roughened by its time on the soil and—most of all—of a pale colored, like the yellowed page of a family Bible or the shade of a day-old squash blossom. Yes, there was the melon, and alongside it, the tools for its slaughter: a large, tarnished butcher knife with a wooden handle, used from time immemorial to butcher both hogs and watermelons; a roll of paper towels (the eating of watermelons is, after all, not an activity to be entered into tentatively: it must be pursued vigorously and with gusto, preferably using the entire body forward of the shoulders; and such an act of vegetarian gluttony requires considerable provision for cleaning oneself. The last item on Grandmother's watermelon spread was a salt shaker. Strange though it may seem to those not raised in the South, there is no better complement to fresh melon than the ubiquitous sodium chloride. My Grandmother's saltshaker was shaped roughly like the Eifel Tower, with a square bottom, flared at the corners, then sloping upward like the arc of a whippoorwill, startled on its nest, taking flight; it was crowned with a shiny silver cap like a bishop's miter, perforated with several dainty apertures, each yielding a single grain of salt, as if to emphasize the value of the mineral within. As my Grandmother's beefy forearm plunged the knife into the melon, we each held out breath, hoping for the much-desired 'crack' that is the joy of all who spend ten months of every year longing for the two in which we harvest melons in North Carolina. Though we knew the code—the etiquette of choosing the perfect melon—still there was always an element of surprise, a revelatory instant in which a sharp cracking sound heralded melon nirvana. More times than not, her choice gave forth the desired crack, and we would smile and breath deeply, knowing that this would indeed be a fine melon. The moment of peril past, my Grandmother would quickly draw the knife through the fruit, its ruby fruit unctuous and deeply perfumed; then, she would slide the first giant slice across the table to me. I waited for a moment as she cut her own, then we bowed our heads and thanked the Maker of Melons and Men, acknowledging how good it is to be blessed, with a July day and a melon and a grandmother or grandson to love sharing it with. I can't remember a time when I haven't loved food, not in small part because of its inseparable connection to the love of so many wonderful people in my life; but the First Melon, in addition to being a harbinger of Summer, was one of the experiences to which I can point, recognizing that I have long loved food with a passion that goes beyond what most people seem to experience. Year after year, we shared this ritual—and year after year, even when I was in college, my Grandmother reminded me not to swallow the seeds, “...because a watermelon vine'll sprout out of your ear!” In my enthusiasm, I often chewed up the seeds anyway, and in my younger years, often woke in the night to wonder what, exactly, the initial symptoms of a melon vine growing from one's ear might be. My Grandmother finished her course in this life as I knelt over her on the floor, right in front of the sofa where we used to read the Burpee book. I remember touching her head and telling her how much I loved her, and I couldn't help thinking of our 'wish book' and that first melon I'd have to eat alone come July. Now I have a little boy of my own, and I pray that in the grace of sharing melon in the shade and other rituals, he might catch a bit of that same wisdom, love and character I learned at my Grandmother's table. Thank God for watermelon, July days and Grandmother's love!