Garden Rows and Truck Roads
Mom wrote on May 21, 1979:
“Today was beautiful… We finished our strawberries and raspberries today. Keith also planted some trees. What a great day this was.”
And a week or so earlier:
“I planted some peas and beans in the garden and mowed a little lawn… Donny had fun playing outside today. He sure is a little sweetheart…”
Those are the grown-up notes. Underneath them was my entire universe.
The garden started as Dad’s tractor carving dark furrows into the east side of the yard. For me, that was the opening ceremony. As soon as the soil was turned, it became my construction site.
I had:
- A yellow Tonka dump truck
- A scoop loader
- A gravity wagon in my imagination even when it was just a plastic trailer
While Mom saw rows, I saw roads. Her onion line became my main highway. The little furrow where she planned radishes turned into a canyon my trucks had to cross.
She’d kneel at one end, dropping peas into the earth, and I’d be at the other, hauling imaginary loads of gravel. Sometimes our work overlapped:
- I’d carefully drive the dump truck between the rows, trying not to flatten anything.
- She’d ask me to “water the road,” and I’d very seriously haul the garden hose over, as if I were a municipal worker in charge of infrastructure.
It was all one thing: her tenderness for the plants, my obsession with vehicles, Dad’s faith in seeds and sweat. None of it felt separate.
I remember the smell of that first real garden year:
- The sharp, green tang of crushed weeds.
- The mineral smell of hose water hitting warm soil.
- The faint sweetness of manure Debbie had come to collect for her own plot.
That mix—dirt, diesel residue from Dad’s Allis-Chalmers, goat smell from the barn drifting over—became what “home” smelled like in my brain.
Looking back from 2025, those afternoons feel like training for the work I still do: drawing maps, building worlds, laying out invisible systems that only later bear fruit. Mom was planting food. I was planting stories. Both needed rows. Both needed roads.