The Dahlias Mom Grew by Feel

How a blind woman plants a garden

I spent the rest of that winter asking people who knew more than me. A physical therapist at the hospital in Atlantic said three things. Keep her hands busy and her knees low, because most falls happen standing up and turning.

Give her something solid to hold along the whole length of the work. And make the ground under her feet the same every single step.

Andy listened to all that over supper and then went out to the shed.

In April, as soon as the ground thawed, he drove steel T-posts every ten feet along the yard side of the bed and strung a heavy rope between them at Mom’s hip height.

He wrapped the rope at every post with a strip of duct tape, so she would know by feel when she had come to the next one.

Then he laid wood chips down the path beside the bed, three inches deep, so the footing was soft and the same all the way down.

I bought Mom a thick foam kneeling pad at the farm store in Atlantic for twelve dollars, and a medical alert pendant she wore on a cord around her neck.

She hated the pendant. She wore it anyway, because I asked her to, and because Rolf asked her to.

In April she divided the tubers on a card table out in the yard, in the light and the air.

She could not see the eyes, the little buds on each tuber neck where the new growth starts. She found them with her thumbnail.

“Here,” she would say, and put my finger on a bump no bigger than a grain of rice.

“That’s an eye. Cut here, below it, and leave a piece of the crown.” She did not miss one. Forty-one clumps became one hundred and twelve divisions.

She also did something that spring that I did not understand until much later.

She had saved a little paper envelope of seeds from the fall before the mowing, from the old Duet, and she asked me to start a few in a flat on the porch.

“Dahlias don’t come true from seed,” I told her. “You never know what you’ll get.”

“I know that,” she said. “That’s the point. I want to see what’s in there.”

Planting

We planted the third week of May, after the last frost date for western Iowa, on a warm still morning with the meadowlarks going in the pasture across the road.

Mom walked out holding the rope with one hand and her foam pad with the other.

I went down the row first and set each wooden stake, so the stake would be in before the tuber and we would never drive one through a clump later.

Then Mom came behind me on her pad, moving one length of rope at a time.

She dug every hole herself with a short trowel, six inches deep, and laid every tuber on its side with the eye pointing up.

She covered each one and patted it down with both hands, the way you would settle a baby into a crib.

The first Saturday we got through forty. She was tired and dirty to the elbows, and she sat back on her heels at the end of the row and laughed out loud, the first real laugh I had heard out of her since July.

“I didn’t fall,” she said, like she had won something already. “Not once. Tell Shelly I didn’t fall.”

That second Saturday, a boy I did not recognize at first came walking up our lane with his hands in his pockets.

He was fifteen, tall and skinny, with a farmer tan already. Behind him, back at the road, a man waited in a pickup with the engine running.

“Mrs. Petersen?” he said to Mom. “I’m Ethan Hadley. I’m the one that mowed your flowers.”

Mom sat back on her pad. “I know who you are, Ethan. I know your grandma. Come here where I can hear you.”

He came and stood at the rope. His ears had gone red.

“Mrs. Petersen, I didn’t know. She just said the flower bed was getting to be too much and you wanted it cleaned off. I didn’t know what they were. I’m sorry.”

“Did you keep the forty dollars?” Mom asked him.

He swallowed. “Yes, ma’am. I spent it on gas for the mower.”

Mom was quiet for a second, and I honestly did not know which way she would go.

Then she held out her trowel, handle first, toward the sound of his voice. “Then you can work it off. Get down here. Six inches deep, eye up.”

He worked every Saturday morning that May and June. His dad, Craig, waved from the pickup every time he dropped him off.

Ethan never once complained, and Mom talked to him the whole time about what each plant would look like in August.