I especially remember when Don would plow the garden in the early spring. He plowed it using a pair of horses, one white, one brown – Sam and . . . um . . . I can’t remember the brown horse’s name. It was magical for a six-year-old to watch the steady gait of the horses with Don walking slowly behind them. He would wave at me every time they came to the end of a row and I would wave wildly back, calling out the horses’ names as they lumbered by. “Hi Sam – Hi…um…Brownie?” That’s it – his name was Brownie. How could I have forgotten?
I’m sure Don planted lots of vegetables in that garden, but the only one I cared about was the corn. He was so generous in sharing the ears with us – every August was Sweet Corn Month to me.
Fast forward to when Bing and I moved back to Algona two years after we were married. We lived in a little rental house on South Moore Street which had a huge garden at the foot of a hill in the back. My Chicago boy was ecstatic, he was going to have a real garden! I’ve never understood where that love of gardening came from – growing up he certainly had no access to such a thing, but nevertheless he hankered to plow, plant and reap.
He had no horses like Don, but managed to borrow a tractor to dig up the ground. Besides corn, he planted lots of melons, pumpkins and tomatoes. Probably other stuff, too, but I was focused on the corn. When it ripened, he would walk home from his nearby law office at noon, go down and grab some ears and – viola – that was our lunch. I suppose I picked them sometimes, but he was never happier than when he was in his garden, so I let him do most of the work. I’m not a gardener, but I love the results.
One of his secretaries told me a few years ago of the time she and the other legal secretary, both farm girls, discovered just what a city boy Bing was. He came rushing into the office one morning, apologizing for being late. “The windstorm last night flattened my corn so I had to push it back up this morning,” he told them breathlessly. They managed to refrain from laughing out loud, but told him gently, “Um, Bing, the corn would have righted itself in a few hours.”
When we moved from that little house, we never had a garden again. Bing did try – he planted tomatoes along the back part of our Fair Street house yard. I did say, didn’t I, that I am no gardener? Well, when I was mowing the yard, the tomato plants looked like weeds to me so I mowed over them.
I think he finally forgave me. After all, I was doing a good deed by mowing, right?
And, anyway, tomatoes are vastly overrated.