Eight Raised Beds for Grandpa Emil

The first morning

I did not tell Grandpa. I could not stand the idea of him saying no, or saying it was too much trouble, so I just showed up at Maple Court at seven o’clock on a Tuesday morning at the end of April.

“Get your shoes on,” I said. “I need your help with something.”

“What kind of something?”

“The kind I don’t know how to do.”

That got him. He had never once in his life turned down somebody who needed help with something they did not know how to do.

I got him down the elevator and into the truck and folded the wheelchair into the bed.

We drove the six blocks to our house, and I wheeled him around the side of the garage and stopped at the end of the gravel path.

He did not say anything. He looked at the eight beds, all that bare dark dirt, the cedar still raw and yellow, and the path running between them.

Then he put his hands out, and I rolled him up alongside bed one. He leaned forward and laid both of his hands flat on the soil, palms down, fingers spread. And he left them there.

He left them there a long time. I stood behind the chair and did not say a word, and neither did he. A mourning dove was going somewhere down the block. The neighbor’s dog barked once and quit.

Finally he picked up a handful and squeezed it, and opened his hand, and watched the clod break apart the way good dirt is supposed to.

“Your drainage is wrong on number four,” he said.

I about laughed. “What?”

“Number four. You’ve got the downspout from the garage emptying right at the corner. First good rain, that end’s going to sit wet for a week and rot the roots. You’ll want to run a piece of pipe out to the alley.”

He was right. I had not thought of it once.

Then he looked up at me with his eyes all wet under the brim of his cap, and he said, “Well. What are we planting?”

“Whatever you say, Grandpa. It’s your garden.”

He nodded slowly, like I had handed him something heavy and he was getting a good grip on it.

His plants, his money

That Saturday I drove him out to a greenhouse east of Ottawa that he had bought from for thirty years.

The woman who runs it came out to the truck when she saw who it was and hugged him right there in the parking lot.

He picked every plant himself. He went down the tables in the wheelchair, turning the pots, looking at the stems, checking the undersides of the leaves for bugs.

Six Brandywines. Four Rutgers. Four Better Boys. Two Cherokee Purples, because, he said, Grandma always liked how ugly they were. Bell peppers. Jalapeños for Jenny, who puts them on everything. And seed for two kinds of pole beans.

At the register I reached for my wallet, and he put his hand on my arm.

“My garden,” he said. “My plants.” He paid out of his own billfold, counting out the bills slow and careful. The woman did not hurry him one bit.

I understood then that it mattered. It was not a present I was giving him. It was a garden he was keeping, and a man pays for his own seed.