Grounded

The Garden Years: the 50's

A small town Midwestern childhood gifted me with the assumption that everyone had a garden, like having a storm windows or snow boots. It was just done, like visiting the cemetery on Memorial Day and buying a poppy from the American Legion members who sold them on Main Street. 

We didn't really need a garden. We lived comfortably on a street of homes filled with post-World War II families with stable jobs and growing children.  I never heard Mom and Dad, who disagreed on so much, ever quarreling about the garden, however. Two Depression babies would have a garden, cut and print.  

Beans, tomatoes, carrots, zucchini, corn, radishes. The beans and carrots were canned for winter.  The beans were bitter, muddied green, and mushy. The carrots just mushy. How could the labor-intensive process of home canning have left them with any vitamins? 

Much much later I learned to gently steam vegetables, bring them to the plate with structured softness. And fresh, yes; living in California meant I'd never have to eat a canned vegetable ever again. 

I must discuss Midwestern sweet corn! My little brother and I were child-greedy for summer corn and watermelon in their short and bountiful season. Fresh corn seems to fill bins at the local market almost all year, though, and food seasons, major culinary events in cold climates, are minor here.  

Best of all were the zinnias.  My mother loved them.  So we always had staunch, crisp, bouquets on the dining table, their colors shouting like fans when Henry Aaron hit a homer.  If my mother had been a flower, she would have been a zinnia. 

There were roses on our dining table in December now, zinnias decimated by garden snails that wouldn't go away. In December the Nativity crèche along the shoreline drive nestled under palm trees and gentle Pacific waves rolled onto a wide gentle beach, instead of snowbanks and pines. The way it must have been.

The earliest garden memory is from my father's childhood home. When we came to visit my grandparents, their chicken coop provided us with many family dinners, and the huge garden besides the usual veggies, had asparagus and a strawberry patch, berry bushes, and a huge swath of summer flowers, especially dahlias, my grandmother's favorite. 

When we visited in summer, we loved to go for an evening drive, hopping out of the car to pick wildflowers from the roadside ditches for her.  How she smiled when presented with a bouquet of them, though it was a twisted thing, caused by a serious stroke which left her dour face partially paralyzed. 

Then we'd stop at the Dairy Queen - a popular dessert, made with sugar, corn syrup, whey, mono and diglycerides, artificial flavor, guar gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan and Vitamin A Palmitate.

This in a state with more dairy cows than people.

The County Fair awarded prizes for the biggest pumpkins and squashes, the fattest pigs, the best flower arrangements, best home-sewn clothing - Mom's coat won a prize one year, as did my blueberry muffins. 

My childhood ended at age 12, like most do, but not with puberty, but a reset from middle earth to seacoast, small town intimacy to bursting urban expansion. Instead of dairy, it was about oil production and aircraft manufacturing.  We would not need a snow shovel, snow tires, storm windows, nor fear tornados. Mosquitoes would not plague us, nor extreme humidity. The flora and fauna were strange, semi-tropical and international, with a kind of monstrous flair and showmanship. They left me with a sense of malaise that fitted the experience of my adolescence that began in Southern California.

I thought parsley was the only herb there was. Mom, remembering her cafeteria work as a WAC, always placed a sprig on our plates, which my brother and I ignored. you could get abalone at the market in those days. 

The produce shelves were abundant, with all-year supplies of the greenest lettuces, strange fruits and berries from Mexico and Hawai'i.  And there were all the fresh flowers, citrus, avocados, and beef, and strange vegetables like jicama, eggplant, artichokes, chilis, fennel, radicchio; I still haven't stopped discovering them.

Snails ate our flowers, and mid-western favorites we tried grew listlessly, no doubt trying to tell us how confused they were. My father, stunned by the lack of rain and the warm dry climate, overwatered mightily, causing shrubs and trees to grow stunningly fast.  He seemed to spend all his time struggling with the unknown shrubs and hedges that enclosed the envelope of yard we had. My mother worked again, and we were now teenagers. Life was busier here, somehow.   And so, we never had another garden.  

We had a white birch tree that I loved; its branches weaved, its leaves danced, turned golden and then finally released themselves in November. Perhaps it remembered that it was supposed to do that back where it really belonged. 

I plant zinnias again, and find to my joy the snails don't seem to eat them.  And they are magnets for the butterflies of summer, monarchs, fritillaries, swallowtails, painted ladies.  My mom would have been so pleased.