The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

The rest of that Tuesday

After Keith turned away from me, I walked up to the house and sat down on the porch steps. The same steps she fell on. I sat there until the skid steer quit and his truck pulled out.

Then I walked out to the pad. The stakes said forty by sixty. The black dirt in the pile by the fence was still damp underneath, and it smelled like every summer of my life.

I picked a handful of it up off the pile. There was a white bean seed in it, from last year, that had never sprouted. I put it in my jeans pocket. I do not know why.

I sat in my car with the windows down and thought about calling him. I thought about calling our cousin who sits on the township board. I thought about driving straight to the rehab wing and telling Mom.

None of those did a thing for the problem. The garden was gone. Mom was coming home on Thursday the fourth of June. Whatever was going to be waiting for her had to be there by then.

Then I went down to the cellar, where it smells like potatoes and the furnace, and found the seed jars on the top shelf above the canning rack.

There were eleven quart jars, each one with paper envelopes inside, and each envelope labeled in Mom’s slanted cursive. Half-runners 2025. Okra 2024. Zinnia, red, 2025. Grandma Ebel’s pink, 2025.

The half-runner jar was almost full. That bean line went back to 1985. She had saved a handful of the best pods every single fall for forty years, letting them dry brown on the vine.

I carried the jar up to the porch and sat on the top step with it in my lap.

I looked at the strip of lawn between the steps and the gravel drive. It was about thirty feet long and twenty feet deep, full sun from noon on.

It was close. That was what I kept thinking. Close enough that a woman with a walker could get to it without crossing the gravel.

The walker

The next morning I drove to the medical supply on the square in Marshall and bought a new aluminum walker, the folding kind with two front wheels, for sixty-eight dollars.

I parked it at the bottom of the porch steps and pretended I was Mom. I took the steps one at a time, gripping the rail, then set the walker on the sidewalk and took four steps out.

Four walker steps from the bottom stair put me right where the first row could start. Twenty feet more and I was at the gravel. Everything she needed would be inside that box.

I marked the corners with four of Keith’s orange survey flags that had blown off his pad. I will admit that part gave me a small, mean pleasure, and I asked the Lord to forgive me for it later.

Then I sat on the steps with my phone and called Ginny Albers.

“I need help with something,” I said. “It’s going to take three or four days and it’s going to be hard on your knees.”

Ginny did not ask what. She said, “I’ll bring Vic’s tiller. It hasn’t run since he died, so bring gas and a spark plug.” She hung up before I could thank her.

Then I called Rose Kemper, who lives across the blacktop and still keeps a few beef cows since she and her husband sold the dairy herd.

“Is this about the garden?” Rose asked. “I saw the skid steer from my kitchen window.”

“It’s about a new one,” I said. “By the porch. Before she gets home.”

Rose was quiet for a second. Then she said, “I have two years of rotted manure behind the barn. I’ll bring a load in the morning.”

I sat there with the phone in my hand. Neither of them had asked me what Keith thought, or whether Mom knew, or whether it was a good idea. They just came.