The Garden Waiting by Mom’s Porch Steps

The seed jars

That night I went through the seed jars one more time on the porch, under the yellow bug light, sorting what to plant. Late May is not too late in central Missouri for any of it, if you water.

Tomatoes, the twenty-four starts, in cages. Half-runners, six rows. A short row of okra, because Mom would never forgive me if there was no okra. Zinnias at both ends, red ones, for the church altar.

Inside the half-runner jar, under the envelopes, there was a folded index card I had never seen. Mom’s handwriting, but younger and rounder.

It said: 1985. From Mother’s beans. Save the best ten pods every fall and never let anybody tell you the old ones are done.

I sat with that card for a long time. Then I put it back in the jar exactly the way I found it, and I went inside and slept on Mom’s couch with the windows open.

Planting day

Saturday, the thirtieth of May, came up clear and soft, about seventy-eight degrees by noon. Ginny got there at eight with a cooler of sandwiches and a bag of old wire tomato cages from her shed.

Rose came at eight-thirty with her granddaughter, a quiet girl about fourteen named Kaitlyn who had just finished eighth grade and was on my bus every morning that year.

“Miss Tracy,” Kaitlyn said, and looked down at the dirt, shy outside of the bus. Then she picked up a hoe like she had been doing it all her life, because she had.

We laid it out with string and stakes the way Mom always did. Four rows of tomatoes at the back, closest to the porch rail, so she could reach them from the steps on a bad day.

Six rows of half-runners in the middle, three feet apart, so a walker could go down between them. The okra on the west end. The zinnia seed sprinkled across the front where the yard met the gravel.

Ginny planted on her knees, with a folded feed sack under each one. She is seventy and has had one knee replaced. I tried twice to make her sit down and she told me to mind my own business.

Rose had brought two flats of half-runner plants, six inches tall, that she had started in April from seed Mom gave her last fall. She set those out first, two rows of them along the far side. Then she pulled the rest of the seed from Mom’s envelopes and dropped it two inches apart, eye up, in a trench an inch deep, the way Mom taught her.

Halfway down the second row, Rose stopped and sat back on her heels. She looked at the bean in her fingers for a while.

“The summer we lost the dairy,” she said, “your mother brought us a bushel of these every week. Every week. My boys thought she was a bean fairy.”