If you are lucky enough to have your mother live a long time, and you share a love of the earth, you might get the chance to garden alongside your mother as I did on the Great Plains.
Visiting while weeding can’t be beat.
While my dad installs a new solenoid on his John Deere mower, we clean the perennial beds. We uncover last year’s plantings under the leaves, eggshells and coffee grounds. There are too many perennial beds for me to get to them all; that would take a much longer visit.
We’re never alone. Her four cats supervise the work: They check out the flower beds, and then they check my dad’s progress.
My mom heads to the potting shed that my dad built a few summers ago. She’s cleaning and organizing it. Something she does in short order. No one cleans and organizes like my mom. Spring arrived with extreme weather: a 90-degree day followed by the threat of an overnight freeze. She lines up her pots, so she’s ready to take them into the potting shed overnight.
She says the orioles are back, and I spot a nest on the highest branch of the weeping willow. Gardening in the great migratory flyway is to garden accompanied by a symphony of birdsong. The shelter belt that’s full of trees, and protects three sides of their acreage, is streaming live with birds. And I’m not just talking about sandhill cranes. There are ducks, owls, hawks and songbirds. Nebraska is on the great bird migration route and thousands of species pass through each spring. On our weekly calls, as my mom carries the phone around her gardens, I can hear the birds.
We take a break and eat a tuna fish sandwich, and then we get back to the watering. Despite the record flooding, the 60-mph winds suck the moisture out of her newly planted forsythia. I have no idea how she and my dad have managed to keep everything watered on their acreage. I carry a bucket to the far corner of their land and realize how my mother got the biceps of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And then there are the tons of large rocks that ring all the beds that she and my dad haul from Kansas during their weekly rock-hunting treks.
Proust said it best: “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”