Mother's Day Garden

With my grandma's health problems, this Mother's Day was focused on her. My mom, my brother, and I fixed up her vegetable garden as a Mother's Day gift. The task was simple enough in theory, but once we got started, things were much more difficult than I expected.

Grandma and Grandpa used to grow vegetables in their backyard. I remember eating very small, misshapen peas, green beans, and carrots. That's the price you pay for growing your own vegetables in Oakland soil: unusually small and deformed produce. I never really thought about it back then, but it was fun to use the term "Grandma's backyard beans."

But when my grandpa got really sick with cancer, both my grandparents stopped working the garden. The garden has been barren ever since Grandpa got sick. It would be both literal and metaphorical to say that when Grandpa died, the backyard died.

I took Grandpa's death pretty badly, and part of my coping with the loss was taking care of Grandma. I remember driving in from Davis every weekend and spending Friday nights with Grandma. I remember writing my term papers in the back room while Grandma would bring me ridiculously strange food items she bought using coupons from the Sunday paper.

It was a very sad time, and I alleviated some of that sadness by working in the backyard. It started with small projects like raking pine needs and weeding, but I eventually moved to larger projects like rebuilding the walkway.















Grandpa originally built the walkway using scrap wood he found around town. But over time, the wood began to dry rot, and it was dangerous for Grandma. So I rebuilt the path the fall after I graduated from college. My family said that I was channeling the spirit of my grandpa, but that's not true. I built the walkway selfishly as a way of making myself feel better. It was a way I could make a physical difference at a time when I felt emotionally lost. And like when I was writing my term papers, Grandma always had food for me.

I really wasn't channeling my grandpa's spirit. Where he used patience to find scrap wood, I bought pressure-treated wood from Home Depot. While he added and removed spacing boards as the walkway swelled and shrank with the seasons, I simply nailed the boards down. I may have copied his original blueprints, but our spirits operated in very different ways.

And today, I rolled up my sleeves and returned to the backyard.




I didn't get a true "before picture" of the weeds that were up to my waist, but this is the garden before my brother and I planted tomatoes and beans and beets.






Here are some "after pictures." It doesn't look like much difference, but it was hard.




I'm sure Grandma thought it was a nice gift. But for an ailing woman who has trouble walking, I'm not sure how useful a vegetable garden is. Maybe my mom and brother were just a few years behind me; maybe they were just trying to find their own way of relating to the backyard that for so long represented my grandparents. It was nostalgic working in the garden, and like the walkway project a few years ago, it was more difficult than I expected.

This was a both a wonderful and lonely Mother's Day.