Grandma's Garden
K Whan

 

Grandma's Garden
Copyright 2002 Ken Whan
Word count 1942

My grandmother had a rose garden. Actually it was kind of a rose garden - blackberry - bunny haven type thing.
And when we were young my sisters and I would play in it.

Grandma's garden was what I would consider to have been a "romantic" rose garden. With half tame rabbits that lived in the garden and would scamper around during the evening hours peeking out from under a rose bush or a berry patch and hopping about delightfully amongst the brambles. Blackberries that grew as big as plums were mingled amongst the red and yellow roses and apples blossoms cascaded the landscape each spring from the tree that grew at it's center.

Grandma and I would venture out in the early summer mornings to sit on the bench swing. It hung from the limb of an old apple tree in the center of the garden. Past the weathered and ivy covered white picket fence with it's perpetually open and half falling down little gate.
We would sit and watch the sun rise over the purple, red, gold, and green mountains that surrounded and embraced the little holler she and Grandpa called home. I would sit on the bench swing with my knees tight to my chin and my arms wrapped about them and Grandma sitting beside me. Then Grandpa would come out dressed in his overalls to start his day of farming his little parcel of Eden and I would chase after him. And Grandma would head toward the house to do what ever it is that Grandmothers do when little boys aren't under their feet.
My Grandmother was a little thing of a woman, a bundle of energy in her dresses of gingham and floral prints. With beautiful long white hair that reached past her waist that she wore up in a bun during the day. Each evening she would set in front of the pot bellied stove in the living room to comb it. It would shine and sparkle in the dim light from the fuel oil lamps.
I confess, she was my first love. A love and adoration that a little boy held for a most wondrous woman. A woman who could tell stories about real cowboys and real Indians. Who always had hard rock candies in the cookie jar. Who was always as amazed as I about a found treasure or big black bugs crawling across a twig or beneath the bramble of the rose bushes. And could cook on a blackened wood burning stove and create the most wondrous dishes. She made her own breads from whole wheat to golden cornbread and there is no smell this side of heaven as wonderful as homemade bread baking in a wood burning stove. And she was a woman who could chase a silly little boy around the table and out the back door waving a wooden spoon and scolding me for sneaking a strawberry from the bowl on the hand-hewn wooden kitchen table with it's white lace table cloth.

I don't think Grandpa or Grandma ever drove a car. Whenever we came to the holler Dad would take Grandma in his car and off we would go to the "supermarket". I say that with tongue in cheek because the market was what we today would consider as nothing much more than a quaint country store. It had a row of glass containers on the counter that to a little boy contained all the candies in the world. And the treat was to have one of each at the extravagant cost of perhaps a whole quarter.
Grandpa had a mule, all the families throughout their mountain community had mules and most of them were called Abraham. I think it derived from something in the bible about Abraham being as stubborn as a mule or something like that. The "supermarket" was located down the holler and on the far side of the valley, a good 10 or 12 miles one way. A journey that traversed rolling hills and a wide but shallow river to the paved road and the 8 or 10 buildings that constituted the town. In a way Dad's car was an unwanted blessing to Grandma because usually when she needed staples from the "supermarket" Grandpa would harness Abraham to the tram and the day would be spent visiting friends and collecting shopping lists along the way. The trip back was made dropping off the purchases and discussing all the latest news (gossip) of the day.

Nearly everything Grandma and Grandpa owned or consumed came from the produce garden that Grandpa grew or the deep woods of the Appalachian Mountains that surrounded their home. It was in those woods that Grandpa, Dad and I raided a honeybee hive one summer. I can still recall the smell of the smoke and the buzzing of the bees and Dad reaching into the old weathered tree stump and giving me my first taste of wild honey complete with the comb. I helped Grandpa and Dad fill the pail with honey and with my chest swelling from little boy pride I presented the bucket of golden treasure to Grandma.

Dad built a sitting porch off the left side of the house one summer. The view spanned the mountain range toward the east. Although the porch had been built with wood and timbers from an old shed that had deteriorated over the years the porch was forever referred to as "the new porch". After dinner and while the women did the dishes we "men" would sit out the summer evenings on the new porch. Grandpa took to smoking his evening cigar on the new porch with Dad and me. I learned of bears, bobcats, and friendly Indians. And I learned that although Grandpa wasn't all that old it was at his suggestion of creating something to soften all the rocks in the world that God first created dirt. "Who could have guessed that all these plants and trees and stuff would come from that one little suggestion?" he would say.
Dad and Grandpa would tell me stories of when he, my Dad, was a little boy. The time Dad disturbed a bear and how that bear chased him. "...across two mountains and clear across the valley" How he (Dad) had left to fight the "Great War" and got shot in the leg, and other tall tales and even taller adventures.
And it was on the new porch that I drank my first cup of real, grown-up coffee (a wondrous experience for a 6 year old).

Winter visits were a delight. My sisters and I all slept in the same room of the two-bedroom home, sharing two huge feather-stuffed 4-poster beds. There were no interior doors as the only heat source was the pot-bellied stove in the living room. A trip to the outhouse consisted of sliding my stocking feet into Grandpa's huge boots for that cold early morning run out the back door and up the holler. (No indoor plumbing here). For my sisters it was a trek but for me it was an adventure. Icicles hung from the edges of the roofs, and the mountains, covered in snow, glittered in the moonlight. The stars were so bright it seemed you could pluck them from the sky. Rabbit tracks ran hither and yarn and the garden, with its' rosebushes and blackberry brambles leafless and silent, lay wrapped in a gentle blanket of ice and snow. And then there was the wild dive back under the covers of those over stuffed 4-poster beds (to the howls and complaints of my sisters) to await a breakfast of Grits and eggs with biscuits or hot oatmeal and butterfat rich, non-pasteurized milk.
To fetch water there was a hand pump on the front porch over the well and in the winter it would freeze-up. We would have to heat water on the bot bellied stove to thaw it out. Once thawed out one of my sisters would furiously pump the handle like a crazed railroad signalman as I poured water into the top to prime it.

The years of childhood seemed to last forever in Grandma's garden but as the saying goes, time stops for no man and eventually Grandpa passed from this life to the next. The visits became more frequent and Grandma's sister, aunt Gertrude, (Gerdy) a widower herself, moved in with Grandma. But things had changed. More and more you could find Grandma on the garden swing. She told me once that here was where she would converse with Grandpa. I knew what she meant and I would talk with him too, in my little boy way.
Time marched on and the following year Grandma rejoined the man she had traversed life with, her childhood sweetheart. . . together again.
Gerdy moved away to live with her children up north. We never returned to the old homestead and the rose garden after that and I don't know when it was that Dad eventually sold the home where he had grown into manhood.
Dad. . . who had taught me how to find directions by looking for the moss on the trees and which saplings were best for making fishing poles. Who would lift me up on his shoulder and I felt as though I could touch the sky and get dizzy from the height..,eventually passed on.
 
Years later I visited the old homestead. The shallow river that Dad used to drive through and Abraham used to wade and had so often fascinated me with it's changing colors and changing moods had been spanned with a concrete and steel bridge. The wagon path that had served as the main road had been paved over and there were homes along the roadway. Mail boxes and electrical poles dotted the landscape and outhouses were a thing of the past. Manicured lawns and pickup trucks were everywhere.
I drove across the rolling hills of the valley, past the little one story church with its' groomed gravestones and turned up the road toward the old homestead. Stopping the car where the farm gate once stood I walked the final few yards to where the house and rose garden had graced the landscape of my childhood. A few old timbers and rusting sheets of tin roofing were all that remained. I stood beneath the old apple tree that had once held the garden swing.
All had changed and that day, I wept.

Time has continued it's journey and now I am "Grandpa" to so many. And it took time for me to realize that.., the garden wasn't really gone..,it had just been transplanted. Complete with blackberries, roses, and half-tame bunnies.., And I understand, just as I understood those many years ago. Grandpa is there, and Grandma, and Dad, and my sisters. I can close my eyes and find myself there with them. I can still see the sun rising over the purple, red, gold, and green mountains and I can lean close to the blossoms of Grandma's roses and smell their fragrances. Grandma is still as amazed as I about a found treasure or big black bugs crawling across a twig or beneath the bramble of the rose bushes. "The new porch" is still there. And the rabbits, and the gate, and the swing, and Grandpa in his overalls, and Dad, and the honeybee hive and even ole Abraham.
Yep, my grandmother had a rose garden. Actually it was kind of a rose garden - blackberry - bunny haven type thing.
And when we were young my sisters and I would play in it ....

 

 

Copyright © 2002 K Whan
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