You Can’t Take the Country Boy out of the Man

The turn of the year always gives me pause. The summer equinox, the longest day, just passed. I plucked the first tomato from my second-floor container garden and held the wonder of it. With this tiny harvest came memories of gardens past.

My dad was a rural soul, despite a closet full of suits, a medical degree, and a house in suburban Birmingham, Alabama. This notion first presented itself when I ate supper at a kindergarten friend’s house and made a puzzling discovery: her family ate beans from tin cans.

Until then, I thought beans came from 32-ounce jars. After all, jars of beans, tomatoes, peppers, beets, and bread-and-butter pickle lined shelves in our playroom. Jars of muscadine grape, peach, pear, and blackberry jam glowed like jewels next to the Pachinko machine. Boxes of empty Mason jars—awaiting next season’s harvest—towered on the upright piano.

I rushed home to report the news. “Most people eat processed vegetables,” Mom said, confirming this new fact of life. “Aren’t you children lucky that your father is a wonderful gardener?”

Lucky to have a dad obsessed with transplanting north Georgia mountain tradition to a strip of Alabama soil? I didn’t think so, especially on Saturday afternoons. While the neighbors’ kids played kickball on the cul-de-sac, our family tended the crops on the utility easement at the back of the yard. Martha, Bud, Mary, Peggy, and I did not feel sentimental about growing squash, zucchini, cucumbers, tomatoes, okra, corn, and beans, beans, beans.

The bean field: a forbidding jungle

By early July, vines strangled the beanpoles, their lush leaves hiding pods. Baskets in hand, we trudged to our appointed rows. How we ached after an hour of reaching high and bending low. How we longed for a drizzle to relieve sweat-stung brows and itching, vine-brushed arms.

No wonder I rolled my eyes years later on reading Thoreau’s bean chapter in Walden: “I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late. . . . It is a fine broad leaf to look on.” He could idealize agricultural experiments; he never suffered Alabama’s growing season in the dog days of summer.

Inspiration: trickster Tom Sawyer on the art of delegation

Tom Sawyer proved a more inspiring literary figure. He turned the chore of whitewashing a fence into an enviable pleasure, so we determined to give humble string beans cachet. Bud figured that if each of us invited a friend to drop by at four o’clock, five kids would show up about the time we started stringing our just-picked produce on the patio. With a little playacting, twenty hands instead of ten would be on task.

“Do y’all have to string all those beans?” a curious onlooker inquired.

“Sure, nothin’ to it.” Martha was the smoothest talker of us all.

“Really?” another wide-eyed child asked.

“Oh, yeah. Last week we strung twice as many,” Martha said nonchalantly, knowing that this audience would soon be captive.

“Wow!”

“At least two bushels.”

“Can I try?”

“I don’t know. . . . It takes most people two years to develop the technique,” Martha said as she rapidly snap-snapped.

“But I’m a fast learner.”

“I don’t know. My father doesn’t like just anybody handling his beans.”

“I’ll be careful. I promise.”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“Let me just try.”

“We-e-e-ell, maybe . . . ”

Ah, the art of delegation.

Storytelling or tall tales?

My dad relished his role as the offbeat neighborhood legend and scoffed at the notion that the Waltons, the Depression-era TV family, were poor. “Heck, they were rich,” Dad said. “They had a radio and a car. Doc Weeks had the only radio in our county. On Saturday afternoons, he propped it in his window and turned up the volume for everybody standing around in his front yard.”

Indeed, anything mechanized was a thrill in Pickens County, Georgia. If the citizens of Fairmount—about ten miles away—spotted a car, they called my grandfather’s general store that it was on the way. Then a crowd gathered by the side of the road to watch as it rattled by.

Sometimes Dad got carried away with his storytelling. One of my friends went goggle-eyed on seeing my father stack fifteen quarts of just-creamed Silver Queen corn in one of the playroom freezers.

“Why are you putting up all that corn?” she asked.

“Haven’t you heard about the famine?” he said, looking dumbfounded.

“A famine?” she asked, her voice quavering. “Can my family come to your house if we run out of food?”

“Have you heard the story of the Little Red Hen?” Dad looked at her sidewise and then inspected the sage and rosemary drying on the pool table.

The girl ran home to report the imminent weather disaster to her mother, who promptly called my mother in a panic.

Dad turned to folklore to fend off rabbits, squirrels, and other interlopers. Once during Sunday dinner, he noted that human hair scattered around plants supposedly warded off animals; he eyed my two waist-length braids. Fortunately, it was just a passing thought.

Watering crops the DIYI  (do-it-yourself-irrigation) way

Watering the “back forty” became Dad’s obsession. Hoses snaked through the backyard and then wound around metal laundry line poles staked every three rows. Lawn sprinklers topped the poles, sending wave after wave of precious drops during dry spells. Anyone picking vegetables under a beating sun could refresh under these automatic showers.

Dad dreamed up this irrigation system after he spotted a hose sale in a hardware circular. When he came home with his prize purchases, Mom was not happy. Some hoses were tan and orange, not color-coordinated green.

One fine March day—before Dad installed his watering system—he burned off the previous year’s stalks before planting. (There is a pyromania boy lurking inside every grown man.) Shocker: the local power crew had tromped through the easement the day before, trimming stubborn vegetation at the base of a telephone pole a few yards from the herb patch. Dad lit the first match. Whoosh! It was a barnburner. The trampoline mat melted in three seconds.

Cooking supper, Mom heard faint calls: “Hose! Hose!”

She poked her head out the kitchen door and called, “Wha-a-at’s that, dear?”

Smoke misted through the trees. “HOSE! HOSE!”

Mom tripped down the pebble path and yelled, “Which color would you like?”

“Any damn hose you can find!”

About then, the firefighters, whose station sat atop the next ridge, spotted the conflagration. They sat on their porch for years, entertained by my dad’s eccentricities. They good-naturedly climbed the woodsy hill and hosed off the easement in minutes. Thereafter the next-door neighbors kept long hoses screwed into outdoor faucets—just in case.

The farmer and the lady of the house

Dad’s front-yard gardening also captured attention. It was his uniform: a tattered, one-piece cotton jumpsuit that usually had seed packets, spring onions, or carrots absently stuck in the pockets. Sometimes he tied a scarlet bandana around his head in homage to Willie Nelson. In Dad’s world, only the Man in Black (Johnny Cash) overshadowed the Red Headed Stranger.

Intrigued, a well-coiffed socialite tooling around in her Mercedes once pulled up and tried to hire my father. “My, you look like a hard worker,” she said with saccharine condescension. “How would you like to work full-time in my yard?”

“I earn a good rate here,” Dad said, leaning on his rake.

“I’ll top any price,” she bargained.

“I get homemade lunches and fresh-squeezed lemonade and brownies on breaks,” he said, cocking his head.

“I’ll prepare any food you want,” she insisted.

“I also get a special bonus,” he smiled wickedly.

“What’s that?”

“I sleep with the lady of the house.”

The woman backed her car out of the drive, from zero to forty miles per hour in two seconds.

Dad’s country habits nourished the body. Sweetly they comforted the soul. He rocked his children and grandbabies, crooning ballads and hymns sung by his family. On the night of his funeral, I imagined, like a prayer, his deep, off-key rendition of “Amazing Grace” and wondered, if heaven existed, whether he was picking purple, pink, and yellow zinnias to make a homey bouquet just for my mother.

With my poetry collection (The Tears of Things: Poems) in print, I’m working on my next book—quick, easy-read creative nonfiction, quirky and laced with a bit of humor. It’s mostly tales of family and friends that I’m ready to hand off to subsequent generations—small pieces of immortality that connect us through the ages. If this story resonates, I’d love to know. Thanks for reading!