A Garden Growing

Just when it’s finally warm enough to start showing your thighs again, the grape tomatoes appear. The wee red spheres are sweet enough to reduce down into a jam, but taste equally swell raw, eaten right off the vine. My mom and I can only palm about five at a time on account of our tiny, goblin hands. We snack on the ripest ones out in the garden then fold up the bottom of our skirts and load the make-shift pockets with piles of tomatoes. We waddle in through the back door into the kitchen, careful not to drop any baby tomatoes. We serve them atop crispy BLTs and mozzarella wet with vinegar or just sprinkled with a little salt and pepper.

It’ll take another month or two before the little red spheres are joined by their bigger, more succulent cousins, the heirlooms. By that time, the squash and okra will have arrived at the party. My mom will proudly insist on semiregular tours of the garden, showing off thick crops ready to pop off the stalk. The many animals that tear up the garden will also have made their way in through the fence by then.

My mom has tried everything to run off those sneaky little bastards from her garden. She’s employed natural remedies, scare tactics and even folded a few times and laced the garden with pesticides though she doesn’t like doing so. One day shortly after the move from Florida to Virginia, this quest brought us to the shoulder of Leesburg pike around rush hour. “This is the one I was telling y’all about.” My mom sprung her 5’, elf-like body out of the driver’s side, sliding on rubber gloves in transit. As lawyers and financial consultants sped past, she loaded a wild mess of roadkill into white trash bags. Bones, feathers, and innards. “MOM. JESUS.” I sunk down low in my seat, burying my face between my new skinny jeans. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain, she cautioned automatically. I covered my head with a jacket to avoid spotting by Allie or Jessa V. or any of the girls I simultaneously venerated and feared. My face was hot and my throat was tight. I prayed to the good Lord that I would evade notice; that this moment wouldn’t become my new nickname. I didn’t know much then, but I did know that “roadkill” was a few rungs below “fuckface” in terms of refrains a crowd of hot thirteen-year-olds might chant at you at a pool party. “MOM! That’s disgusting! Can we please go?! “My mom threw the trash bags in the trunk. It’s already dead. “What’s better: you let the thing rot on the side of road like some commute entertainment or you bring it home, clean it and make something of it, hm?”

At home, she stripped the carcass of any remaining feathers over a tentative shield of Washington Posts and coupons for discounted Bugles and bulk yarn. She boiled the bones in a massive stainless steel pot, stirring occasionally over a rolling boil as if she were preparing a late Sunday afternoon dinner of stewed beef Bourguignon and crusty bread.

She put the bones up on a stake at the entrance of the garden. The teeth wrapped around the top of the pike, balancing there as if the animal (no clue what it was) had just taken a bite. Looking at it now, it’s less of a BEWARE than a rustic motif of the Southern Gothic. “Oooooo True Detective Season 1 Looks!” My sister would proclaim during one of my mom’s guided tours of the garden. “This is some spooky shit right here, Mom!” I can imagine a sweaty, jaded small-town detective coming across it and tilting his head, making a rough sketch and gravely confirming his hunch about some satanic cabal operating out of ole Virginia.

It keeps the bigger animals—deer, raccoons, etc. —from chomping on the plants but does little to dissuade the needle-sized insects from spreading all over the tomato plants. They typically start from the outer left of the garden as if they learned proper dining etiquette at the local cotillion, munching and mangling the leaves and vines day by day. It breaks my mom’s heart. She goes out every day. Kneeling down, she holds a dotted leaf up to the sun, peering through the green film as if it were stained glass. The leaves are spotted and littered with holes around the edges and for a week or so my mom concedes. The plants will die. The garden will cease to grow. The scarecrow will be alone again.

But they grow. Once the earlier crops start to fizzle out, the flowers begin to bloom. Brilliant Reds, Purples, and Oranges grace the garden, growing up without restraint. They grow so quickly my mom has to send home guests with a bundle of carnations. Bring these back to that sweet mama of yours! Where the little tomatoes died out, peppers sprout. The soil births green beans and more flowers than you could imagine. The leaves themselves have their own will to live. They appreciate our intervention I assume, but when the rubber hits the road, they can handle it on their own. They grow through September and march on somewhat weakly through October until the leaves bow their heads and fall and your thighs retreat into a stiff pair of jeans.