The Garden I Grew for the Pantry
The first load
The first bush beans were ready the first week of July, tender, snapping clean.
Nine people showed up at seven on the first Friday to pick. I sat at the end of the row in my sun hat with my hands in my lap and watched them work down the rows with the dew still on the leaves. Bush beans, picked young, before the seeds swell. If it bends, leave it. If it snaps, take it.
By eight the baskets were stacked in the bed of Roy’s pickup. Four bushels of beans, a bushel of cucumbers, and a flat of the first zucchini, small as a man’s wrist, the way they should be. Macy had drawn a farmhouse in marker on the side of one basket, with a tiny sun over it.
The farmhouse was mine. She had gotten the porch right.
I stood at the edge of the garden with one hand on the tailgate and the cane in the other, the first time I had stood out there without the walker. Jace took my picture from the porch without asking, and I have seen it. A very old woman in a straw hat in front of a pickup, bushel baskets at her feet, a farmhouse behind her, and a garden shed with a sagging door.
Roy drove the load to the annex himself. I let him. The next morning, Saturday, I told him I wanted to go along.
We pulled up at a quarter till nine. The line was already out the door and along the wall, thirty people or so in the sun with their cloth bags and cardboard boxes. I went in the side door with the cane and stood against the wall by the coat hooks.
For the first time in forty years, I did not leave.
Nadine unlocked the front. I watched them come in. A mother with three boys. A man in a Carhartt coat in July. A woman from my own church. A boy of about twelve who took a bag of green beans and carried it out in both arms.
Nobody thanked me. They did not know it was me. They looked at the beans and the zucchini and took what they needed.
Dee Ann was in the line, on her day off. She saw me against the wall and did not say a word. She touched the brim of a hat she was not wearing, took her bag of beans, and went on.
The first one
The first ripe tomato of the year was an Early Girl, on the ninth of July.
I saw it from my chair, hanging low in a cage on the fourth row, hidden under a leaf, gone from green to the color of a good barn. I let it hang another day, because that is what you do, and on the tenth I sent Macy down the row for it.
She carried it back in both hands, like something from a church. A good size, a little split at the shoulder, dirt on one side.
Roy put it on my kitchen windowsill.
“That one’s yours,” he said. “No argument. It’s the first one, and it’s got your name on it.”
I looked at that tomato for three days. I would walk past it with my walker and look. It sat in the sun and turned from a good red to a red you could see your face in.
On the third day I carried it out to the truck myself and set it in a basket with the others, on top.
“It’s yours, Deloris,” Roy said.
“I know it is.”
I was not being noble. I had only never in my life known what else to do with the first one.
The corn came on the last week of July. I stood at the edge of it at six in the morning with my cane and my hat, and watched a dozen people I had not known in May pick it for people they would never meet.