The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

The fall

On the first Saturday in May, Mom was dragging a garden hose across the porch steps to water her tomato starts when her foot caught the hose.

She went down the three wooden steps and landed on her left hip.

She lay there for almost an hour before Ginny Albers drove by on her way to town and saw her red housecoat in the yard. Ginny is seventy and lives a half mile south.

A surgeon in Columbia put a rod and three screws in her hip that night. After four days they moved her back to the rehab wing in Marshall, so she could do her therapy close to home. They told us three weeks, maybe a little more, depending on the stairs.

I drove the rest of the school year with my phone on the seat beside me. When the route ended each afternoon, I drove out to the farm to feed her cats and water her tomato starts.

She had started them in March on the sun porch, the way she always did. Twenty-four plants in cut-down milk cartons, lined up on boards across two sawhorses where the south light comes in.

Mortgage Lifters, and a pink one she called Grandma Ebel’s that came from a woman at church forty years ago. Mom saved the seed every fall. Nobody else in the county had those plants.

School let out on the twenty-first. On the twenty-sixth, the Tuesday after, I drove out with a new bag of potting soil for the starts. That was the day I found the skid steer.