The Gardener
What is it about those lovingly tended gardens that bring joy?
Dad, when at home on the island, was the human equivalent of the Mary Celeste. Everything about his life was perfectly in its place, except the way he arranged his mind. Dad was banned from the kitchen. It was not unusual for him to drift aimlessly through the house without thought of direction, occasionally finding himself in the kitchen, and prompting Mum to ask: “Darling, are you lost?” He would look around, momentarily orphaned, then respond: “Aye, lass, I think I be,” before turning astern and leaving the way he entered.
Dad began commercial fishing when he was nineteen and two years later purchased a trawler. There are many stories I can tell, not just of Dad’s exploits but also of those men who worked with him and ultimately became part of my family. But not today; today, I want to talk about Dad, the gardener. He loved to grow vegetables.
Dad said: “…lad, you can only enjoy a garden as long as you tend it.”
I was ten years old when I started to learn about gardening. Dad gave me that responsibility every time he left for open water. Throughout my life, a garden has been a source of immense pleasure, regardless of where or in what climate. Now, with Dad long gone, that desire has intensified.
If there was ever a pot of half-used anything lying around the greenhouse, Dad’s boot never missed it. The resulting profanities begged forgiveness among the tomato plants, for there, and only there, was he immersed in his life’s sanctity.
Boots that ordinarily would have been tossed out months, if not years before, were fastened with their flapping soles to the uppers with fishermen’s twine, the same sort used to repair lobster pots. It kept those boots intact for all my teenage years. Being with Dad was as close to being whole as a young man could be. On the days when he arrived home from the sea, Mum’s face was a picture of devotion, and the smells that emanated from the kitchen were like no other, having used all the fresh produce of Dad’s garden.
Once a month, Dad would try to be home on a Sunday, and I would wake at dawn to a yellow light flickering on my bedroom wall. I’d leap up, look out the window, and see a heap of garden debris burning. One time, Dad blackened the entire village before daylight. He was exciting, immensely strong, a mystery to himself but not to me because he was everything of a champion, sometimes a renegade, a destroyer of doubt, and that was who he was, my Dad. Never a mystery to Mum in sixty-two years of marriage.
Living in a tightly knit community has its drawbacks, with teenage romance being one of them, but great in many ways. It allowed people to share, to care, and to support. I know it happened in cities, but not at all in the same way. Dad kept potatoes; Willy kept bits of fishing boats: propeller shafts, rusting anchors, bronze couplings, bulwark supports, boilers, cylinders, crank rods, pistons, and flywheels. These things meant a living to him; to others, such relics were nothing but the town’s eyesore. I mention Willy because he often picked rhubarb or carrots from our garden. Dad, of course, was always in Willy’s scrap metal yard.
My home was everyone’s home on the island. It was where friends came to taste Mum’s scones, topped with homemade clotted cream and blackberry jam, and to swallow down a large mug of tea.
Such summers, it seemed, came often.
Standing in the garden today, I look down to see my boots needing repair. I won’t, of course.
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