My childhood friend and I are hauling
my brother’s old aquarium out of the basement
sneaking up the backstairs,
“nature Girl” she mocks affectionately
The two of us laughing and giggling.
After all, I don’t want him to get any ideas, I don’t want any flack.
It’s Spring and time for me to pull out the trowel,
And create my miniature glass world
of fern fiddleheads, violets, verdant green carpets of velvet mosses,
My springtime Terrarium!

Do you remember the photograph you took of me long ago
standing in my father’s garden
I am holding his shovel spoofing “American Gothic”
Behind me a yard laid bare and fallow without his handiwork.
He had died suddenly the year before,
I can see the dirt on my hands in the photograph.
wanting to reach him this way, but discouraged
Everything is now second rate and shoddy, no rhubarb,
the raspberries are dwindling and no tomatoes, not a single one.

I remember the seasonal rituals and duties of this place,
His tomato garden, year after year, summer after summer
And accompanying it, the omnipresent compost pile,
filled to the brim with leaves, and
all year long we’d add to this concoction
Kitchen scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds,
bursting out of the wire fence in late November,
it held such importance for his plantings.
So many endless leaves to rake: maples, chestnuts and oaks.
My brothers shouting, laughing, metal rakes scraping, scraping
Laying sheets and painting tarps like large ghosts in the big yard
dusty leaves piled high and their sweet pungent smells,
marking so many autumns of my childhood.

Then in early spring, maybe that first night of warmth
Forsythias, first cherry’s emerging like
tiny little lanterns of yellows and pinks glowing In the night.
following him in the yard, with a skip in my step like young girls would do –
eager to see what the long winter had produced:
oily brown, wet, squished-down, decomposed, flattened leaves.
I hear his eager voice, lighter and cheery
All the stress and strain removed.
He’s free of himself for a little while-
planning, drawing pictures in his mind,
plotting out on graph paper where the tomatoes will be,
and maybe he’ll try lettuce this year.
As my father turned the clumps and leaves over and over with his shovel,
a kind of mist smoked out of the immense pile.
I marvelled at this mysterious potion magically transformed over the winter.

Navigating through thorny scraggly vines in late summer.
My sister and I racing out before dinnertime,
Pulling the good ones, bursting deep orange, right off the vine
gathering in the fall, wrapping the unripened green ones in newspaper,
And, to my mother’s exasperation - still so much yield!
She stepped aside, while we worked the kitchen like a factory.
the old stainless steel counters a sea of oranges and reds,
my father and I canning relish and stewed tomatoes by the hour.
his dedication to these marvelous red fruits and me working
alongside him, the industrious thirteen year old daughter
Pots, boiling water and the meticulous timing,
and how it made me nervous sometimes.
But I remember this now in the writing
The humble beauty of the mason jars lined up
the pride we felt in the production line we had created
And the companionship we had on those days.

Leafing through old photos today I found that one -
my “American Gothic” parody.
And I went on that long journey back to that ancient memory
And the stories I told you when a big family lived
In a grand old stone house, they had a yard with a lovely garden
and a father taught a young daughter
To pick up a shovel, dig in the dirt and love the gifts of nature.
Loving it for face value,
and knowing the returning gifts at the end of the day
or the end of the long season.

Today I’ll divide up the Hostas, and replant the Iris,
clean out the beds
It seems as though I’ve done this forever,
but each Spring it feels new again
like he is teaching me for the first time,
Hands in the dirt, I’ll try to reach him again,
And He’ll follow me out to the garden
pressing me on to work a little bit harder
“go for the wicket “he’ll say
I’ll unearth something new in him, something not known before
And I’ll talk a blue streak about you.
here in my garden, in my imaginings,
or at least on this page for a little while.