Ma Walton and the Squash Monster

I have a problem.  I admit it.  I have always wanted to be Ma Walton.  Ever since I religiously watched the show years ago, I have been trying to recreate a facsimile of it in my own life.  Since my mom’s idea of dinner was getting dressed up every evening and heading for the country club, it’s been no small task for me to figure this all out.

 

The first thing I knew I needed to do was get a big old table in my kitchen and fill it up with a bunch of kids.  Fast forward a few years and 4 kids later…..  Check!  The next thing on the list to becoming Ma Walton looked like gardening.  After all, didn’t Ma and Grandma Walton sit on the porch and shell peas or beans or something? 

I started with a small veggie patch when the kids were young and every year it got bigger.  I was reasonably successful at it and even started making big batches of pasta sauce with wine from my tomatoes to freeze for the winter.  Yup, Ma Walton was starting to feel very familiar! 

 Fast forward 30 years, many gardens and mountains of vegetables later. To be perfectly honest, I have to admit that this time of the year, I start to wonder if there is something wrong with me.  My kids are all grown and on their own.  I could be lying in a hammock looking out at the lake instead of pulling weeds and hauling home buckets of produce that sit on my counter and look accusingly at me!

This spring a young man who lives in a little cottage near my garden wandered over.  I was staring at my still slightly frozen soil and planning how to get a truck load of composted cow manure transported and dug in.  He wondered if he could have a small portion of the garden in exchange for giving me some help.  I said a silent “THANK YOU” to the universe and handed him a shovel. 

Two days later he had the cow manure hauled and installed.  I wanted to shout “ALLELUIA!” Instead I controlled myself and reveled in the great conversations we were having, sprinkled with all those words that manic gardeners love such as “sustainable living”  “grow food, not lawns” and of course the big O as in ORGANIC! 

I had a new raw recruit to mentor!  Life was good and I was going to teach him how to live off the bounty of the land!  I pictured him remembering me years down the road when he had his own sustainable organic farm, complete with a hand hewn log home and some free range chickens.

  

I gave him his own little space in my garden, and we companionably planted seeds together in the warm spring air, as I babbled instructions on cool weather crops and how to replace them with something else in his space as the summer progressed.  I pictured us weeding, watering and harvesting together.

For the first week or two, I hand watered the seeds every day.  I figured since he was at work, I could sprinkle his patch.  The little seedlings started to grow and so did the weeds.   I started to wonder where he was as I thinned out my lettuce and carefully weeded around my young plants.  Occasionally I would see him in the evening bending over his little patch looking puzzled.  Other times he was out on the end of the pier fishing.  It was getting really difficult to run into him.  The first time I kind of sarcastically mentioned that he needed to actually water and weed his stuff to make it grow, he mumbled that he had been “watching to see what I was doing in order to learn something.”

Time passed and his weeds grew along with his radishes and lettuce.  I mentioned that perhaps he should start pulling some of lettuce to make room for tomato plants.  He said, “I don’t really like tomatoes.  They give me gas.”  I suggested alternatives, such as peppers, cucumbers and beans.  All of this was met with a blank look.

At this point I started stealing his radishes.  I mean who lets perfectly good veggies go to waste?  I caught brief glimpses of him as he was “heading up north to camp with his buddies.”  He often had large parties of friends over for barbecues and swimming while his ragged little patch was pretty much becoming an eyesore.

One of his duties was supposed to be turning over the mulch pile.  I regularly dumped my veggie scraps there, and it was not a job that I looked forward to.  I kept hoping that he would step up to the plate, grab the pitchfork that was so handily stuck in it and give it a few hefty turns. 

Eventually, I noticed some vines sprouting from the center of it.  I mentioned it to him on one of his sprints past the garden as he was heading for his motorcycle.   He said he hadn’t thrown any seeds of any kind into it.  I explained again how it needed to be turned over so that things wouldn’t grow in it.  He nodded and smiled as he roared off on his bike with his girlfriend perched on the back, who was looking decidedly unfriendly at me. 

I sighed and promised myself that I would find someone to turn the compost pile over tomorrow.   

Then we had a week of heat and rain.  The plants in the middle of the compost pile got really large, really fast with little ovals hanging all over them.   The pitchfork was buried under a huge tangle of vines that was starting to look like a squash monster. After another week I realized that it was my favorite kind and that there were going to be A LOT of them!  I vaguely remembered throwing a moldy Delicata on the pile in early spring. 

All of this has convinced me to look at the bright side.  I managed to finagle someone to work a truckload of cow manure into my garden, and I also have an unexpected bumper crop of delicious squash to harvest!

In the meantime, I keep telling myself to downsize my garden. But part of me is already mentally making a list of what needs to be done in the garden this fall and next spring and who I can con into doing it.  BTW….does anyone need a few zucchini?

                                                                                               

My Surrogate Moms

I have had several surrogate moms over the years.  It’s not that I didn’t have a real mom at the time, but there was a darkness and discontent that became more evident as she aged, and she often turned to me to help her feel better.  I remember her asking me to play her favorite piano piece again and again when I was a young girl because it helped her to relax.  Over the years, I have come to understand that she really did the best she could.  She encouraged my artwork, made sure I had piano lessons and taught me downhill skiing in her better years.  I have many good memories of her.

She never shared her secrets with anyone and the facade of fancy clothes, new cars and lovely homes became her identity.  She had a fierce desire for me to be everything she thought she was not, which was something that I rejected more and more as I grew up.  I wanted a more casual mom who didn’t mind wearing something old, someone who laughed easily and hung out in the kitchen doing yummy things with food. I wanted a mom who was grounded in the love of her home and family.

My first surrogate mom was my former husband’s grandmother.  Grandma Helen and I shared a close and special relationship of love for my young family, gardening, good food and laughter.  I could tell her anything and she would listen without judgment.  It seemed like an extraordinary gift to me at the time. Whenever I see a peony, I think of her and her little garden that was filled with them. 

My second surrogate mom was Marie.  I met Marie when I fell through the ice while skating on our lake.  I could never resist skating on the first clear ice of the season.   Since the water was only about two feet deep around the shore, I often took the chance and glided on that transparent icy surface when it was still fairly thin.  It felt like I was flying over the visible fish and sandy bottom below. The year that I fell through, I was in front of Marie’s house.  I was wet up to my knees and my skates were filled with icy water.  I knew I had a long cold walk home, until a sweet elderly lady called out her door and asked if I needed help.  I came in and warmed up while we got to know each other.  She lived alone and was partially blind.  She never complained and was always ready with stories of her beloved dogs that she had shared her life with over the years and of her dear husband.  I brought her dinner each Sunday evening for many years.  Marie always had to show me the gloves she had saved, one of hers and one of her husband’s.  She kept them carefully displayed on a table….holding hands.

I met my last surrogate mom when I purchased 10 acres of land for my log cabin in the mountains of New Hampshire.  Bertha lived down the dirt road from my newly acquired land.  The road was named after her family and must have been the last parcel that she owned other than the one her home was on.  She lived in what was basically a converted garage.  As the building of my cabin progressed, mysterious dishes of delicious food appeared for the workers at the site.  It took us awhile to realize that they were being left by Bertha. 
 

She made it her mission to help me feel at home in those mountains.  I often walked down the road to visit and never left without the gift of something she had made.  Bertha loved to make houses out of scraps and cover boxes with fabric.  Her little converted garage was crammed with projects that she had created or was working on.  Once in awhile she took me to visit “her girls” who were the waitresses she had befriended in the little cafes and restaurants in several little towns down the mountain.  She always had little gifts she had made for them from her stash of crafts. 

I remember each of my surrogate moms with love.  They simply were exactly who they seemed to be.  No frills women who loved and accepted life joyfully in the moment, just as it was. They are all gone now, and I smile each time I think of them.  I also smile and send love to my own dear mom.  I honor her attempts to give me a wonderful life and to show the world a happy face despite her darkness.   I think I finally understand how she struggled and tried to do the best she could.  I wish I could hug her now and tell her again how much I love her. But I think she knows.