Eight Raised Beds for Grandpa Emil

The third floor

Sharla had found him an apartment in the senior building in town, a three-story brick place called Maple Court, with an elevator and a community room and a pull cord in every bathroom.

It was clean and safe and the rent was based on income. I will say that for it.

Every single thing Sharla said about that apartment was true. It was exactly what a sensible person would choose for an 87-year-old man with a new hip.

His unit was on the third floor, at the end of the hall. One window, looking down at the parking lot and the back of the Dollar General across the street.

Jenny and I moved what furniture would fit. His recliner, his kitchen table and two of the chairs, his bed, his radio, Grandma’s picture.

Sharla had already sold or donated the rest, and I did not ask about it, because I did not want to know.

He came home from rehab on the first of April. He walked into that apartment with his walker, looked around once, and said, “Well. It’s warm, anyway.”

Then he sat down in his recliner by the window, and as far as I could tell, he did not get up for three weeks.

He quit eating

The shop is four minutes from Maple Court, so I started stopping in on my lunch hour. The first week I brought him a sandwich every day.

The second week I started finding the sandwiches still in the refrigerator, still in their plastic, with the date I had written on them in marker.

Jenny sent him soup. He thanked her for the soup and did not eat it. The church sent a meal schedule.

He was polite to every woman who came to the door, and then he put her casserole in the refrigerator and let it go bad.

The nurse who came twice a week to check on his hip told me he had lost eleven pounds since the hospital. He was down to 149, and he had been a solid 160 his whole life.

“Grandpa,” I said one day, “you have to eat something.”

He sat in that recliner with his hands folded on his stomach, looking out the window. I asked him once what he was looking at all day long.

“Weather,” he said. “Out of habit.”

He pointed with his chin at a bank of clouds coming up from the southwest. “Rain’s coming Thursday. Good soaking one, too. Somebody’s beans are going to be glad.”

He said it so quietly. Somebody’s beans. Not his. He had been planting beans the last week of April for sixty years, and he was sitting on the third floor reading the sky for somebody else’s garden.

I went down to my truck and sat there for a long time before I could drive back to work.

The kitchen table

I got home and Jenny was at the kitchen table, paying bills. Rosie was asleep on the couch with her shoes still on, and Miles was out in the backyard throwing a tennis ball against the garage.

I sat down across from Jenny and I said, “I want half the backyard.”

She put her pen down. Jenny is a dental assistant, and she has a way of looking at you like she is checking for cavities. She looked at me that way for a while.

“For Grandpa,” she said.

“He’s down to 149 pounds. He sits there and reads the weather for other people’s gardens. I can’t get the house back. I can’t get the ground back. But I can get him dirt.”

Jenny looked out the kitchen window at our yard. It is not much of a yard. A square of fescue, a swing set the kids had about outgrown, a clothesline, and the garage at the back.

“Take the half with the swing set,” she said. “Rosie only uses the slide anyway, and the slide can go by the fence.”

Then she said, “Travis, how is he going to work a garden from a wheelchair?”

That was the right question. Grandpa could walk a little, with the walker, but anything more than a trip to the bathroom and back, he was in a wheelchair.

He was not going to be down on his knees in a bean row ever again.

“I’m going to bring the garden up to him,” I said.