Aunt Sue was my favorite aunt, and it’s probably fair to assume that I was her favorite godson. She lived a few miles down the road in the northern city limits, in what seemed like a foreign land to a five year old boy. Andalusia – such a mysterious name! She rarely visited on my birthday, but every year an envelope arrived, dependable as the sunrise, a cute little testament to my self-worth hidden within. And a five dollar bill.
I appreciated both. I liked being a rootin’ tootin’ tiger of a kid, in a cool typeface over orange stripes. I savored the thought of being a vroom vroomin’ VIP, over a cartoonish action sequence of primitive monster trucks – perhaps inspiration to those that would command audiences of thousands in years to come. It felt good to be associated with something so official. Little boys like to be official, and they assume adults do too. Little boys despise handmade cards for mom, unsanctioned by anything official. Anybody can do that. But, to a mom, the handmade cards are the ones to be quietly hidden away in the box of treasured memories. That’s all the “official” she needs.
I also liked the five bucks. It meant that a quick but anticipation-packed bike ride to the local Kiddie City toy store was in my immediate future. Though the sign on the door sternly warned “No Children Under 12 Without An Adult”, neither this nor the cold January winds were impediments to a seven year-old boy on his birthday, intent on adding to an already bloated collection of Hot Wheels. It was a bleak day when the store closed its doors permanently, to be replaced by a discount carpet store, the thirty foot Kiddie City Kangaroo facade now transmogrified into a caricature of the fat owner wearing a disco-era, wide-collar shirt that you’d see a crook wear on Hawaii Five-O.
To be sure, we were the town with the thirty foot caricature of the fat carpet mogul on one side of the street, and, on the other side, an actual, real-life, turboprop airliner – bolted to the top of a restaurant – jointly gracing the entrance to town, peacefully sharing the economic landscape with the biker bar and brothel a hundred yards further on toward the railroad tracks. We teemed with kitschy totems to the post-war suburban economy.
We also lived in a swamp. The town’s economic milieu might have been a figurative swamp of post-war cultural decay, but we also lived in a literal swamp during those formative childhood years. Until late middle age, my father was a serial mover. Five or six years were about his limit for living in a house. I don’t think he wanted any of us to get too comfortable. Then again, the continual stream of newborns and, ultimately, a grandmother, into the house might have had something to do with it.
During my earliest years, we lived in Levittown, in what the builder called a “Jubilee”. As far as I can tell, a Jubilee is a poorly-built Cape Cod with neither a basement below nor dormers above, so the upstairs bedrooms each feature a single, lonely window on opposite sides of the house. Shaker simplicity without the grace. But city folks flocked to them. And so we moved there shortly after I was born.
A few years later, the five-year itch struck the pater familias, and he was off to scout some buildable land. Apparently weary of the megascale subdivision that was Levittown, and its implied social ties to dozens of nearby Italian and Irish families, each with its own predilection for Roman Catholic reproductive practices, my father sought less structured and populated climes, where his own predilection for Roman Catholic reproductive practices would end quietly, sans comment or scrutiny.
He found his barren Eden about 10 minutes down the road, a mini wilderness tucked just off the highway, on a road announced by a little white church of uncertain origin, and dotted with a few modest older homes built decades earlier as summer cottage escapes from the city. Between the occasional house lay a series of frog and mosquito infested swamps, the apparent product of drunk civil engineers who years earlier raised roads along farmland without mind for what might happen when water flowed into the land below, imprisoned by roads on all sides.
Such property had one redeeming quality: it was dirt cheap. And so my dad bought his little corner of the swamp. Family folklore suggests that, soon afterwards, the proud purchaser prodded his father-in-law to peruse his prized possession. Gazing over the prehistoric landscape for a few seconds, and realizing that his daughter and grandchildren were being sentenced to inhabit this unholy wasteland, my grandfather reportedly uttered a few unkind idioms, and suggested that the land be sold. Immediately.
True to his instincts always, dad held his ground.
In twenty-first century America, we would have been designated the proud owners of a wetland, full of indigenous species of salamander to be protected at any cost. No matter that it was a man-made wetland. The slightest move to harm a tree or build a foundation would be met with pickets from wacky protest groups, not to mention seven-figure fines from the EPA. And a jail sentence. Salamanders have serious advocates these days.
But this was a different time. When I was a kid, a swamp was a swamp, not a wetland. And this was a first-class swamp. So my dad built us a house on a swamp. Knee deep in muck for months, my brothers cleared the trees, and made way for truckloads of fill. Heads of households were more resourceful in those days, closer kin to the tamers of the American frontier than to the phone-toting soccer chauffeurs of today, of which I am one. Faced with the task of raising a half-acre swamp by three feet, my dad found his solution just a couple miles away in the maturing interstate highway system. As the builders connected two sections of highway to the north and south of town, blasting through the local terrain, they amassed mountains of excess fill, with no place to call home. Seeing the opportunity for a deal, my father closed the transaction without delay. Hundreds of dump trucks and one exhausted backhoe operator later, our homestead soon took shape on the refuse of Eisenhower’s Dream.
Though still surrounded by swamp, we were newly-crowned kings of a happy, clay-encrusted hill, the nicest house in the neighborhood. It was the dream of a five-year old boy and the nightmare of a forty-something mom with seven kids -- no lawn, puddles teeming with tadpoles, fresh mountains of rock and clay still awaiting their fate, leading to glorious and historic mudball battles extending into humid summer evenings. Bath time was an adventure. And so we adapted to life in mosquito-land, isolated from the hordes of Levittown humanity, with iron-tainted well water soiling our clothes and appliances. But there were five bedrooms.
It took a couple years, but each of us reached our own personal accommodation with the new landscape and environment. Mom got her water softener. Dad found a deal on sod, and a lawn appeared magically, within the instant of a school day. The dining room morphed into his office. A basketball court materialized at the end of the driveway. Foundation plantings sprung up, giving quiet assent and legitimacy to our developing monument to middle class America. My brothers bought cars to fill the driveway -- used Buicks and Studebakers and Fords, most with refuse on the floor taken from selected specimens of the many billions served at McDonalds, all future targets of my entrepreneurial car-washing instincts. Our little swamp house had become a home.
I soon learned to ride a bike, which opened my life to previously unknown worlds and vistas, including the Kiddie City and airplane-on-the-restaurant at town center, and even more distant worlds across the railroad tracks, including the bass pond in front of the prep school for future seminarians, from which all bass eluded my hook for years, save one. The public playground was off in a different corner of the universe, and on still another vector lay the field behind the elementary school, where focused, waspy, middle-aged men with rolled-up sleeves flew remote-controlled airplanes after work. When not exploring the perimeter of the universe available to a bicycle-armed seven year-old, there were always the woods and swamps closer to home. There were forts to build, bike trails and ramps to construct, turtles and snakes to torment, and ancient legends to retell of what happened at this or that particular rock on that fateful day decades ago. And so I settled into my new life of swamp explorer and bicycle frontiersman.
It was a sunny Saturday in the May following my eighth birthday, as the Kent State riots boiled many worlds away, when Aunt Sue showed up with a new kind of gift, a new joy that I did not understand at the time. Two forest green, veined, oval leaves on a little stem, with a frilly proto-leaf emerging from the center: My first cucumber plant had arrived.
My aunt’s desire to bring a couple tiny green plants to me remains a mystery, at least at a superficial, cause and effect level. Memory offers few clues. Perhaps it was an earlier passing comment. Perhaps it was just a fun idea, and she had some extras. Possibly. But I suspect the ultimate answer rested in a garden to the west, in another section of the northern city limits, this one at the home of her brother -- the brother whose disgust a few years earlier likely cemented my father’s decision to transform a swamp into Camelot.
My grandfather was a notorious gardener. What I came to know as his garden was in fact a tiny depression-era farm downsized by time and circumstance. Though filled with junk, the dilapidated, creosote-soaked chicken coop nearby offered clues to the past, as did the equipment scattered about the landscape, encased in rust. Authentic rust always conceals a deeper history, deeper than the greatest stories on Antiques Roadshow. Rusty farm equipment has lived life, and has done so on its own terms.
My grandfather’s garden was super-sized, not so much in physical dimension -- though it was a healthy chunk of real estate by modern garden standards -- but even more so in the attitude of what it produced. Nothing in this garden was dainty. Or clean. This was a results-oriented garden for real men, for rugged individualists, for survivors. Emphasis on utility and cubic footage of edible vegetation produced. Quiche could not grow here -- this was a purpose-driven garden, not a showcase.
A reliable heuristic of garden lore is that the fruits of a gardener’s labor reflect his or her personality. Proving the theory in this case, tomatoes and peppers would arrive at our doorstep by the basket, every fruit encrusted in clay, like the faces of middle-aged women at day spas. Like the garden, these were real men’s tomatoes, measured in pounds, bulging in unnatural directions, reminiscent of the waistlines of offensive linemen on a professional football team. The archetypal round, unblemished, ten-ounce slicing tomato did not occur, and would be viewed as weak if it did. Peppers were generally picked green, so that the plants would produce more. Taste had no place in this rubric.
Thanks to my grandfather’s garden, my family ate Swiss chard five or six times a week, between May and October. Unlike many greens, Swiss chard is prolific and heat-tolerant. Best of all to the purpose-driven gardener, it replicates itself all summer; if you pick the outside leaves, more leaves replace them in a few days. The perfect antidote to a Depression, Swiss chard was indestructible, much like my grandfather’s Volvo. And so we ate Swiss chard. And more Swiss chard. Most days. All summer.
Zucchini is a frightening plant in a super-sized garden, as tended by a frugal master of the art of feeding a family on nothing. The plant is imposing by itself, with huge green leaves fit for a sauropod. But, blink too long, and a zucchini plant will grow Goliath’s war club in a heartbeat. You could hollow a small canoe out of one of my grandfather’s zucchinis. The six-inch seedless delicacies favored by modern supermarkets, and coveted by trendy chefs, were mere buds to him. Why on earth would anyone pick a zucchini at six inches if it would grow to three feet within a week? We all have our objectives in life.
As gardeners in the know know, beans are among the easiest and most prolific of plants -- right up there with cucumbers. The bean is God’s gift to survivalists, the perfect plant and the perfect food, crisp and inviting in its youth, but able to dry itself into a crinkly, reliable old adult for winter storage, when neglected on the vine. Virtually maintenance free (reclusive at heart, they don’t even like to be touched), bean plants actually replenish the soil for other plants. None of this was lost on my grandfather, who chose the sturdiest bean of them all for his plot – Italian pole beans. Picked young, Romano beans are a credit to legume-hood. Ignored for a couple weeks, they transform into thick and hairy brutes, much like the old Italian men who grow them.
Weighing the harvest-time trade-offs, my grandfather opted for the cellulose and fuzz. I’m sure this wasn’t an explicit calculation, just an obvious non-issue. Why pick a bean at five inches when it will be double that in a couple days? And so he would let them follow the Path of the Zucchini. Since he preserved what he couldn’t use or give away (opting, for reasons that elude me, to not allow his AARP-worthy bean collection to dry itself on the vine), he would chop, boil and freeze most of his beany senior citizens, finally delivering proud plastic bags of frozen grayish bean cellulose to us periodically over the winter. Or maybe the winter after that -- it was difficult to tell sometimes. His grandchildren thus saved from swampy starvation for another year, he could sleep soundly at night. Unknown to him, the garbage disposal ate most of them.
Much of what my grandfather picked was over-sized by choice, but everything in his garden was larger than life, more robust than any mental stereotype you might conjure. The pepper plants were twice the size of anything I have ever grown (or seen), and the tomato plants laughed at diseases that cause most unenlightened gardeners to flee to the fungicide, particularly those who plant tomatoes in the same soil year after year, as my grandfather did with impunity. It was many years into adulthood that I discovered perhaps his darkest secret, the manna that led this garden to the Promised Land every summer, the stuff of uber-compost legend. No, it was not Soylent Green, nor was this a burial ground for guys named Jimmy Three Thumbs. The ultimate recycler, my grandfather’s seedy secret was the fertilizer heaven within his own cesspool. Heck, the thing needed to be pumped out occasionally anyway -- why pay someone to haul this black gold away?
For years, I wondered why my mother insisted on washing anything from that garden five or six times. I thought it just another of her paranoid momisms, like insisting that we unplug the television every night before bed. Well, she grew up there. Always listen to your mother.
I suspect that, like her brother, my Great Aunt had inherited the Gnostic Truth of the Garden. Though the fragile but hopeful cucumber plants that she brought that sunny day in May cowered in contrast to the sturdy presence of her brother’s garden, she and her brother descended from the same stock, the same survivalist instinct hybridized within their souls. We learn to grow things because, someday, we might need to grow things. And we must pass this knowledge to future generations. Pigeons fly home. Chickens roost. Pigs wallow. Horses graze. We garden. Like a deep secret carried along for centuries within an inter-generational conspiracy, this family archetype needed an incarnation, and I was her Dalai Lama.
Camelot didn’t have a garden in those barren years immediately following the swamp-raising, inasmuch as our property consisted of three or four feet of discarded rock and clay from the interstate highway system, pressed into the consistency of concrete by months of heavy equipment roving to and fro. But I doubt that a garden would have ensued, even if my father had stumbled upon a cubic mile of garden loam instead of a highway crew. We pursue what we know. My mother’s family inherited the keys to agricultural immortality, but on my father’s side lay the deep secrets of plumbing and HVAC. These folks put six-inch drain pipes in the soil, not tomato plants. These are my roots.
My aunt had probably not thought this through, in her eagerness to pass the horticultural torch, but homelessness was a real possibility for Mr. Cucumber. Still, we are called to faith, and her faith was not unrewarded, for one commandment of post-war suburban America is “Thou shalt build shrub beds at thy foundation, and thou shalt plant shrubberies therein, and thy shrubberies shall be chosen from the yew, the arborvitae and the juniper, which are holy, not to mention cheap, really easy to grow, and available everywhere.” And so destiny and karma reached an agreement, and my little cucumber plant found a cozy home just outside the front door next to a fledgling shrub, where I could monitor it on my way out to the daily wiffle ball game across the street.
I cannot say what would have happened to my garden instincts if that little plant had died, rather than grow a couple cucumbers. But cucumbers indeed sprang forth, and there was joy in the land. And I was an instant addict. Adults might view this as peculiar, cute, possibly even a sign of future co-dependence -- but modern society numbs adults to a vast expanse of what we like to call the real world. What adults view as the real world is the tiniest of subsets of what actually exists. Not in some metaphysical, mental gymnastics academic domain, but in the practical, everyday sense of what we can see and rationally experience. For if we took the time to observe and appreciate all that exists in our world, and what things do, there would be few among us who didn’t believe in miracles. We fail to see, and we fail to believe.
Children labor under no such shackles. A child takes a cucumber for granted only through practice and imitation. Until that sad transformation, the process of watching a proto-leaf sprout other leaves, and those leaves sprout pretty yellow flowers, and those flowers sprout spiny little green fingers, and those little green fingers develop into large objects that look like they belong in a supermarket’s produce aisle – all by themselves, with no mom around to show them how it’s done – reeks of the miraculous. And while evolutionists insist that this precisely-orchestrated dance of cellulose and other organic substance is nothing but “apparent design”, a mirage for our apparently-designed, fertile brains to misinterpret, children know better. For me, that cucumber was a miracle. And it remains so to this day.
Miracles change lives, if given permission. And so my life was changed by a cucumber. Though I was my father’s helper in all things plumbing, dutifully holding the flashlight as he would fix the leak in the dishwasher, or slipping like a soldier in battle deep into the recesses of the crawlspace to flick the switch on the sump pump after a heavy rain, my soul was not in the pipes and switches. It was in the soil, with the roots and seeds, where my grandfather and godmother found their reality and their miracles.
In its early stages, the horticultural bug presents as an obsessive compulsive disorder, with no cure except time -- and even that mostly just hides the symptoms. In the pre-digital age of my youth, seed catalogs would appear everywhere. Every empty container was a potential plant pot. Every egg carton was a seed starting kit. Every over-hyped ad for new varieties of giant-sized strawberries was to be believed and reread nightly as scripture, flashlight in hand under the covers. Every weird plant was to be ordered. My demand for money orders in those days was insatiable, as each new delivery spawned more entries on more mailing lists, and more catalogs. Over time, my last name mutated to “Harchrove” on the lists, as it was whispered down the lane of list managers across the industry. But this was no impediment, as our letter carrier knew where to deliver any gardening catalog in the neighborhood.
I ordered seeds for eucalyptus trees, coffee trees, touch-sensitive plants, carnivorous plants, whatever sounded weird and miraculous. And I grew all of them, even the ones that truly were too good to be true. When the catalogs failed me, I would grow whatever I could find in the kitchen – sweet potatoes, avocado pits, pineapple tops, carrot ends, apple seeds, whatever. Nothing was off limits. I grew grass seed on a sponge, just to see if it would work, as the Highlights magazine promised (it does).
Inevitably, I inherited all gift planters, all those elegant offering plates of artificially-induced greenery from well-meaning friends, relatives and co-workers. These were horticultural dead men walking, their fates sealed as they moved from green paradise into the dark foxholes of the average winter household, with its 10% relative humidity. Wearing my Green Cross, I would have none of this brutality, waiting in the wings to rescue the abused, wounded and oppressed, petitioning to assume ownership before it was too late. When those anticipated sweet words would finally arrive – Oh, go ahead, take it! – I would spring into action, a plant medic doing his residency in triage.
I was a medic working in the worst of war-time circumstances. I could dream of the cozy potting sheds that authors speak about from their rustic New England villas, equipped as they are with dedicated benches and soil sieves and every imaginable size of clay pot. I fantasized about bright southern exposures, with the eight-inch window sills of an old Victorian – big enough to accommodate all but the giants of any houseplant collection. Dreams only. Such things were for the glam crowd of the plant universe. Upstarts like me did battle in the trenches of real world suburban America. I begged and pleaded for the basic necessities of a horticultural junkie – potting soil, peat moss, compost – the major food groups. But I wouldn’t dare bother to dream of vermiculite and perlite until I was much older, and able to pay for such extravagances myself. And then I would stretch a small bag for years.
Working on a cold concrete stoop, I could separate the corpses in a gift planter with medical precision -- a process not to be witnessed by the uninitiated. Limbs would be severed, root balls exploded, diseased leaves tossed aside. You learn to cast off the unsalvageable for the greater good, conceding some battles for the sake of the war. Many patients would live to see another day and fight again. Others would be memorialized, at least in my own mind.
From my mother’s vantage, the excessive survival rate was a Malthusian scandal. I suppose there are worse fates than raising a child with a horticultural fixation, but naming them challenges the imagination. For years, the only safe haven for much of my plant collection was a single bay window in the living room. Though not the optimal exposure, it was the only remotely bright spot in the house. So while my mom idealized this as the showplace of her castle on the swamp, it was many years before she could realize that dream. For much of my childhood, the sill of that window was my greenhouse, always featuring assorted dead leaves and spilled soil, continually scarred with stains from overflowing watering trays (which all experienced plant lovers eventually recognize are nothing of the sort – real men water plants in the kitchen sink).
Over time, I discovered and embraced the mystery of seeds. We take seeds for granted, but for me seeds were -- and continue to be -- pure magic. Within every discarded apple core is the power to repopulate the earth with apples. The average pumpkin sports enough seeds within its stringy interior to grow acres of pumpkins any time in the next decade or so. To a kid who never had an allowance, seeds would become an untapped resource of staggering dimension, although it took some convincing to reach this level of faith. When I was very young, I refused to believe that household seeds would actually work. Like hand-made cards for mom, home-grown seeds lacked moral authority. They were not official. Surely, only those seeds carrying the imprimatur of the Burpee company could be expected to do anything useful.
And then one day it hit, like Burl Ives’ snowstorm in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Could the simple act of a bored young teen devouring an orange, juice and seeds dripping everywhere, change a person, a family, and the universe at large? Probably not, but just such an act can affect far more than we might think, much like Rudolph’s playful rough-housing, after Clarisse dubbed him “cute”, was a radical shift for Donner and the gals -- who only through this freak accident of substandard nasal engineering would later learn that Bumbles bounce. And just such a day and just such an act did impact just such a teen.
The year, the day and the orange escaped my memory banks long ago. And, as it turns out, the “orange” was almost certainly a grapefruit – a correction that, many decades later, briefly spawned a monumental scandal in the lore of my family. But a handful of sticky citrus seeds did squirt out of that citrus fruit that history for so long stubbornly identified as an orange. Innocently, and with little expectation, I pressed the pea-sized white orbs into the soil surrounding my dying eucalyptus tree. Why not? – They weren’t official seeds, but it couldn’t hurt. A few weeks later, the decision to sow long forgotten, two hopeful lime green shoots emerged from that pot, a life event equaling the arrival of those cucumber plants a few years earlier. A new quantum reality had emerged.
Our ties to childhood fray and disappear over time, at least the visible ones. As middle age consumes us, we look different. We act different. We adopt different jargon. We lose our Catholic school handwriting skills. We appreciate a clean house. We realize that eating four cupcakes for dinner maybe isn’t a great idea. We become beings that our past selves would not recognize. And we struggle to remember the feeling of being young, from the thoughts that passed through our mushy little brains when we jumped out of bed in the morning to the now-alien loathing of bed time. For most of us, those days are a remote island, separated from civilization, now unreachable by any known technology or thought process.
Today, in the center of my hometown of youth, there’s a gas station where the restaurant with the airplane used to be. The biker bar finally closed a few years ago -- presumably, all of the bikers and the ladies who serviced them now live in retirement homes. The swamp is gone, all my childhood bike trails now replaced by modest, neat, working-class housing. But if you stop by my mother’s front porch on a nice summer day, you can pluck a leaf from an eight-foot “orange” tree (“trees” really, as I never had the heart to separate the two seeds that sprouted fifty years ago). And as you tear the leaf under your nose, the smell of citrus instantly surrounds you, and just for a moment returns you to that island. And for a brief moment that feeling returns. And you appreciate.
Aunt Sue passed away quietly a few years ago. I believe she was 90, but I’m not sure. There was no funeral. But her memory, the memory of my first fledgling cucumber plant, and the life lessons gleaned from both, will follow me to my grave. Permit me the honor of sharing some of them with you.
Appreciate your past. It’s who you once were. And why you’re you today.