Growing up I remember working in our family's garden with my Nana and Pappy. We had potatoes, spinach, string beans, lettuce, strawberries, zucchini, flowers, etc. We even had a scarecrow! The most important thing we grew were our tomatoes! We would sell the tomatoes all summer long at our little stand at the end of the driveway! People would ask us every spring when our tomatoes would be ready. The reason the tomatoes were so important was because all the money we made from them was split between my brothers and I to use as spending money when we went to OCNJ every September. My brothers and I would help my Nana and Pappy everyday with something whether it be digging holes in the ground, planting seeds, picking vegtables, cutting flowers, or watering the plants. The tomatoes were the most work. We would help my Pappy plant them and water them. We would watch the plants grow and wait anxiously for Pappy to say it was ready for the stakes. We would put all the stakes in the wheelbarrow and then rip up old sheets into small strips to tie the plants to the stakes. My brothers and I would fight over who got to pound in the first stake. We would pound in the stakes and then Nana would help us tie the plant to the stake with the fabric strip. In a creative writing class in college I wrote about my experiences in the garden with my grandparents every summer and came across an analogy that means so much... My brothers and I were like those little tomato plants. We needed to be tended to and watched after carefully. We could have managed to grow up without our grandparents but we may have been hunched over and our tomatoes may have been bruised. My grandfather was that firm stake that kept us in line, kept us standing tall, and allowed us to weather any storm. All the while my Nana was the fabric strip wrapped around us loose enough for room to grow on our own but tight enough to know she and the stake would always be there...
Why do I write this story with a picture of a flower next to it? Somehow as much as I loved working in that garden as a child, I did not inherit the green thumb of my grandparents. This is the only standing flower in my flower bed. Somehow it has managed to defeat the odds and refused to give up! Maybe there's hope for me yet!?!?
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