The Butterfly Hours Memoir Project: GARDEN

For 2019 I'm running a year-long series on my blog in which I share my responses to the writing assignment prompts found in THE BUTTERLY HOURS by Patty Dann.

I welcome you to join me, if you like! I've divided the prompts by month, and the plan is to respond to 3 (or so) a week. For some of these I may write poems, for others prose. The important thing is to mine my memory. Who knows where this exploration will lead?

In January I wrote about: apron, bar, basketball, bed, bicycle, birthday, boat, broom, button, cake, car.

In February: chair, chlorine, church, concert, cookbook, couch, dancing, desk, dessert, dining room table, diploma.

Here are March's prompts: divorce, door, dream, emergency room, envelope, eyebrows, first apartment, first job, food, game, garden.

*I'll be taking a break from this project during April, so I can focus on my 2019 National Poetry Month poem-a-day project: ARTSPEAK! Happy.

GARDEN

First, I should mention that I wrote a whole book inspired by my grandparents' garden -- FRESH DELICIOUS: Poems from the Farmers' Market.

And I wrote a whole cycle of poems in 2016 -- ARTSPEAK! Plant. Grow. Eat! So gardens have come up in my writing quite a lot.

 My parents subscribed to Mother Earth News and made attempts at self-sustainability while we were young. This included beef cows, pigs, rabbits for food -- and the subject of some awful can't-shake images; dairy cows for milk; vegetable garden for produce. 

So yes, there were gardens. But it was my grandparents' garden that grows green in my memory. They lived in Port St. Joe where the soil isn't so much soil as sand. It's hard to grow anything there without a lot of water, fertilizer and man-hours spent weeding. Granddaddy and Grandma didn't mind. Or if they did, they just put their heads down and did what needed done. 

I have quite a few pictures of Granddaddy standing in front of various crops. He loved to grow Silver Queen corn and Better Boy tomatoes. He also loved yellow-meated watermelons. Many afternoons I'd sit with Grandma on the concrete back porch steps, her with a giant stainless steel bowl of peas for us to shell or beans for us to snap. Her fingers were long and thin, like mine... and knobby and wrinkly-soft-- not like mine at all. She was gentle with the vegetables, in the way we are all gentle with things we've helped create. She didn't take a single bean for granted. Thanks to her Depression-era childhood, every single one was important. There were no throw-aways.

my kind of garden -
the kind that plants &
 tends itself!

My mother has given over vegetable gardening for flowers. She loves roses best of all and beams when the roses are flourishing and is bothered when they are not. She says gardening is good for her soul – she loves the dirt, the sweat, the work of bringing something up and making the world more beautiful. Meanwhile, I appreciate a garden, but don't want to put in the hours to make it happen. I don't enjoy the heat or the sweat or the dirt under my nails. So I opt for low-care, native species in my own yard and marvel over the efforts of others.

I have been thinking lately that I want to create a fern glade in my shady back yard... and also a small chapel built into the slope overlooking the lake. AND... I want to hire someone to create a mural on the side of the RV shed. Flowers, maybe? Or a landscape of misty mountains? A farm scene? I'm not sure yet. Thinking...