The Row I Planted From the One That Lived

March

In March, I started the seeds. I set up a shop light on a chain over the dryer and two trays of potting soil in the laundry room, and Sophie and I planted two seeds to a cell from the envelope that said From the one that lived.

They came up in six days. Nearly every one. Fresh seed is a different animal from old seed.

I told Irwin what I was planning one night on the porch, with the frogs going in the creek bottom. He listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which is one of the reasons I married him.

“You want to plant a garden,” he said slowly, “in Mama’s front yard.”

“One row. By the road. Where she has to drive past it.”

“Without asking her.”

“Without asking her,” I said. “If I ask her, she’ll say no. And then it’s just one more thing she said no to.”

He was quiet for a minute. “That’s my yard too, you know,” he said. “I grew up in that yard. Daddy would have liked a row of tomatoes by the road.” Then he said, “I’ll till it.”

“With what?” I asked.

He grinned at me for the first time in a long while. “With hers,” he said.

April

The last frost in our part of Tennessee usually comes around the middle of April. Old-timers say wait until Mother’s Day, and old-timers are mostly right, but the long-range forecast that year said warm, and I took the chance.

Doris drives to Wilma’s in Cookeville every other Saturday. Wilma made sure that one particular Saturday turned into a long one, with lunch and a trip to the fabric store and supper after.

Doris pulled out of her driveway at nine. By nine-fifteen Irwin had his mother’s red tiller out from under her carport, filled with fresh gas, and he was breaking a strip of sod along the front of her yard by the road.

The sod was hard and full of roots. He went over it three times.

The tiller bucked and pulled the whole way, and Irwin leaned into it with his shoulders, and I thought about Doris running that same machine through my plants.

It took the three of us all morning. Irwin tilled and raked out the clumps. I worked in two bags of composted manure from the co-op.

Sophie carried the transplants down from the truck in the flat, one at a time, the way she had the year before.

We set out twelve plants. Not forty. Twelve was a row a seventy-one-year-old woman could keep up by herself, if she decided to. I measured them two feet apart with a yardstick so they would be straight.

I made them neat. I want you to know that too. Straight row, new cages, straw mulch tucked in tight, not a weed in sight.

It was the tidiest garden I have ever planted, and I did it on purpose.

When it was done, Sophie went and got the jar.