paradise is obliterated. Worse, the summer sunlight is life threatening to these creatures accustomed to a world of total darkness.
What right do I have to intrude?
Gently rolling clumps of enriched black earth in my hands, enjoying grit under finger nails, recalls the wise of great grandmother Fisher ” Treat the earth as God’s gift and you will be rewarded. Abuse her and you will be punished. the earth is one of God’s fondest creations. He created it for us to cherish”. Ah, the Puritan ethic runs deep.
Peering from the underside of her ever present Amish bonnet, Grammy knew whereof she
spoke. the war gardens in which she toiled from sun up to sun down from April to early November in the 1940’s protected our family from the perils of starvation. Some of the less energetic neighbors did not fare as well.
The men of the family? They were members of the greatest generation fighting for their lives as part of the Big Red One, Pennsylvania’s keystone regiment during the Battle of the Bulge.
The women? They toiled amid oppressive heat and noise at chocolate factory.. Standing on unforgiving concrete floors for long hours, my mother never complained. The work was part of her patriotic duty –making chocolate bars for the troops- including her husband.
How did we survive?
Mounded rows of russet potatoes large red tomato plants, spring onions, stalks of pole beans and mint tea plants provided the staples. Additionally, we spent Sunday afternoons scouring the rocky hillsides of the Blue Mountains scrounging for blueberries and non-toxic mushrooms. The blueberries and their lesser respect relatives, mulberries, were subsequently canned and stashed on crude wooden shelves in the coal cellar.
All this begs the question. How inconsequential is the replanting of a lawn when we owe our existence to the pluck and determination of those who came before us?
All this begs the question. How inconsequential is the rep
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