Eight Raised Beds for Grandpa Emil

Why I didn’t fight her

I want to explain this part, because people have asked me since why I did not just raise Cain about it.

After Grandma Lois died in 2014, Grandpa signed a durable power of attorney naming Sharla. It covered everything, his bank account, his bills, and his real estate.

It was a legal paper, done right, at a lawyer’s office on Main Street, and he signed it of his own free will.

So it was Sharla’s legal call to make. The couple from Olathe paid cash and closed in twelve days.

By the time I even heard the place was listed, there was a recorded deed at the Franklin County courthouse and a new lock on the back door.

There was nothing left to fight. I could have yelled at my aunt in a hospital hallway, and it would not have put one tomato plant back in the ground.

My dad would have known what to say to her. He was Grandpa’s only son and Sharla’s little brother, and he could talk to her when nobody else could.

But Dad drives truck over the road out of Amarillo now, and that whole month he was hauling freight in Georgia and the Carolinas. By the time he heard, it was done.

Uncle Frank, Sharla’s husband, drives a grain truck for the elevator, and he was hauling to Salina most of that month. He did not find out about the closing until it was done either.

So it was just me in that hallway, and I did not have anything to give my grandfather except dirt. That is the honest truth. All I could give him was dirt.

Sixty years of tomatoes

You have to understand what that garden was.

Grandpa carried mail on a rural route out of the Ottawa post office for 31 years.

He drove his own car, sitting square in the middle of the bench seat so he could steer with his left hand and reach the boxes with his right.

He knew every dog on that route by name, and he knew which widow wanted her mail handed to her at the door so she would have somebody to talk to that day.

And all summer long, he carried tomatoes. A paper sack of them on the floorboards, for anybody who looked like they needed one. People in that end of the county still tell me they never bought a tomato in August until he retired.

He grew Brandywines and Rutgers and Better Boys, sweet corn, two kinds of pole beans, and peppers for Grandma’s relish. He won the purple ribbon at the Franklin County Fair for tomatoes so many times they quit letting him enter.

When I was Miles’s age, Grandpa taught me how to tie up a tomato with strips of an old bedsheet, loose, so the stem had room to grow.

He said you tie a plant the way you hold a baby, firm enough to keep it, loose enough to let it breathe.

That garden was not a hobby. It was the way he talked to people, and the way he talked to God, and after Grandma died, I think it was the main reason he got out of bed.