The Garden I Grew for the Pantry

The ground

I stood at the window with my hand on the curtain for a full minute, watching strangers kneel in my field. Then Janelle said, “Mom, do you want to go out?”

“I can’t. The walker will sink.”

“We thought of that,” she said.

She nodded toward the back door.

Roy’s grandson Jace, a lanky boy of sixteen, had laid sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood from my back step all the way across the yard to the edge of the garden. They ran end to end, taped at the seams, with a strip of old carpet nailed down the middle for the walker’s wheels. Where the ice had been, there was a ramp built out of two-by-sixes.

A lawn chair stood at the end of the plywood, with a sun hat hanging on a stake beside it, and my cane. Somebody had taken the cane out of my front hall closet and the hat from the nail by my back door.

“You gave Jace the key,” I said.

“Thursday. Mom, please don’t be mad.”

“I told you I’m not anything yet.”

It took me fourteen minutes to get from the table to the end of the plywood. It would have taken six, but I stopped twice. Once at the ramp, because my knees would not agree about it. And once at the door, because I could smell coffee and wet dirt and the green smell of tomato leaves that have been handled, which is the best smell in the world, and I had to stand there and have it.

Nobody turned around when I came out. Sixty-odd people were kneeling in my rows, and not one of them looked up and made a show of me. A few glanced over, nodded, and went back to work, the way you’d nod to a neighbor at the mailbox.

Roy walked over from the middle of the field and stood beside the lawn chair. His knees were black to the thigh.

“Morning, Deloris.”

“Roy Tabor,” I said. “What in God’s name have you done.”

“I got a little help.”

“A little.”

“Nadine did most of it.” He looked over his shoulder at the field, and I saw something cross his face I had never seen on it. He looked scared. Not of me. Of it not being enough. “I just knew where you kept the string.”