Garden walk

Every summer shortly after my brother and I arrived at our grandparents house for a week with them (and our parents had a week without us) we would be taken on a tour of the gardens. It usually started with the flower gardens that lined the hillside of the front yard along the alley that led to the garage. Day lilies marked the corners (we would later be searching them for foul balls during a baseball game) and perennials of as many colors as northern Wisconsin would allow covered the space in between. Different plants were pointed out, as were the ones that had deer nibblings but might make it yet. The flower tour oriented me to the way we lived for the week or two we would be in the Northwoods. We would be observing and noting, watching for birds and waiting for fish to bite. There was little TV except for the evening news and more importantly the weather report. The only games to rush off to were the ones we created in the yards with the neighbor kids.

After walking the length of the flower bed, we moved to the garden where years of dedicated year-round composting created a bed of nutrients that not even the naturally sandy ground could turn off. They grew tomatoes, squash, several varieties of peas and beans, beets and carrots. There were rhubarb stalks and feathery dill; a plot of corn and rotating rows of salad greens. Grandma would fill a shallow brown bowl with lettuce each night and top it with sweet onions or spicy radishes. Our tour winded down by the wood pile where we would hear the report of the wood burned last winter, and how much was already piled for the next. Later in the week we would find hiding spots behind the rows of wood, cut and stacked by my Grandpa and his friends.

When we finished the tour, we went to the front porch where we could see the highway traffic pass by and hear Grandma preparing our first meal of the week. We waited for the call to set the table while listening to crickets under the steps and the occasional car crunching over a gravel road. At the end of the week we would take the same walk, this time our parents along with us after they arrived for our return trip. This time, we would tell the flower stories as best we could and show them the compost pile and rows of corn and where we clean the fish and which vegetables were which.