Garden lovers know the feeling. It happens every year, when everything is dead and the air is bitter and the colors outside are mostly grey and brown and evergreen. Suddenly you realize that even though the plant world lies dormant, spring is not nearly as far away as it seems - and there is so much planning to be done in the meantime. Catalogs to pore over, instructional books to read, gear to be assembled, seeds to sprout, layouts to design. No matter how inexperienced you are and how many times you have failed and killed thousands of innocent plants, you catch that feeling all over again when you sense that change in the air.
In 2022, I was completely overtaken by just such an urge and was determined to grow the best garden I had ever grown. I have a few successes and many failures to show for the time I have put in as a novice gardener with many other commitments and a life that takes me away from my home a good portion of the year. But I grew up around gardeners. My Granddaddy and my great Aunt Sarah were role models with green thumbs and old-school knowledge. Sarah and my Grandmother both cooked and canned what they grew - countless batches, endless canning sessions. It is in my blood, I believe, to chase down dreams of a thriving garden.
In 2021, my Granddaddy caught COVID-19 and died on the day of the year's first frost, November 5th. It was a devastating loss, especially since it was so unexpected. I find it significant that he passed on such an important day for gardeners - the first frost signals the end of the summer garden season. Getting an estimate of the first frost is how we decide what plants will grow most productively in our region. We consult the almanac for the predictions and then determine the number of days between the last frost of the spring and the first frost of the fall. Plants that mature well within that number of days are our best bet for growing the maximum amount of produce. (Thanks to Jess at Roots and Refuge for helping me understand this so well). Granddaddy exited in a crucial moment of the gardener's yearly circle of life. I don't think that was a coincidence.
I have grown up on family land. All around me are the fields where my great grandfather, Papaw Garlan, grew tobacco, and where Granddaddy and my Daddy all grew up doing the same. Next door is my grandparents' house, as well as the barn, outbuildings, workshop, etc. Across the road is the house where Garlan lived for many years and where Granddaddy grew up - the sink in that house is the one he used to take baths in when he was a baby.
As might be expected of an history enthusiast, tomboy, and animal lover, over the years my life has also become increasingly intertwined with the family land and the farm; I have started raising my own animals, trying my hand at gardening, and more. While Granddaddy was alive, I loved to ask him questions, watch him work, and occasionally help him plant things. Ever since his death, my passion for this land and for honoring my heritage has increased tenfold. This fueled my enthusiasm for gardening even more. I painstakingly planned the seed starting dates for my produce, strategized on what places around the property would work best for garden plots, bought grow lights, and ultimately ended up with a bathroom filled with seedlings over which I brooded and fussed endlessly. I even brought a chair in there and sat by the bathroom counter watching a movie and sipping a cocktail on a weekend night, to give the plants some company and the benefit of some extra carbon dioxide.
Fast forward a couple months. My garden, which I had planted down by Garlan's house and hence named the Garlan Garden, had failed utterly. The red dirt, the missed days of attention to the plants from being on tour, and aggressive weeds choked out the little seedlings before they ever had a chance. I was very disappointed, and frustrated with myself and the whole situation.
One day, I forget what I was doing, but I ended up down on Granddaddy's land and stopped by the place where he had always planted a garden - I think I was considering maybe planting a couple things there just as a last attempt to salvage the growing season. As I started looking, something familiar caught my attention. I stepped closer. Was that...? Surely not. I knelt down by the sturdy plant growing there and bruised one of the leaves with my fingers, and smelled the oils that were released. The magnificent, pungent scent washed over me. It was a tomato plant.
I looked around. It wasn't just one tomato plant. Two, three...no, six or seven extremely healthy tomato plants were sprouting confidently up from the soil, already standing between six inches and a foot tall each. The area in which they stood was covered with fallen leaves, some weeds, and some grass - it looked abandoned, for sure - but those tomato plants looked as good as the ones you can buy at the local garden store - maybe better.
I was stunned. I thought back and realized what had happened. Granddaddy had grown a garden in 2021. In fact, it was the very garden that died the same day he did, when the frost hit. He had grown tomatoes that year like always, and some had fallen and broken down into the soil. Fast forward to the spring; the seeds had then volunteered, somehow flourished despite the lack of any human care, and become proud, promising young plants. These were the direct offspring of the plants he had put in the ground himself, and they had beaten the odds and outdone my own attempts. It was like magic. In that moment, I knew Granddaddy was in that garden. He was right there with me, doing just what he had done in life; showing us all how to do things the right way. I have no doubt that he oversaw those seedlings. He knew I was going to need a backup plan. He was shaking his head, grinning, at my overzealous but undereducated efforts to grow my seedlings. And as someone who was always and without fail a provider, he stepped in and fixed it all.
I grew up with a very particular, very intense set of religious beliefs. It was one of those peculiar doctrines that somehow managed to instill both a great deal of shame and self-hatred and an equally weighty arrogance about the superiority and validity of our beliefs. I was all in - I was zealous and devoted, and I thought I understood life and faith and spirituality and how the world worked. The afterlife was something that we were supposed to feel extremely confident about. But I remember it always scaring me. It felt so far away and so different. It was up there, all perfect and blissful, and for those of us that were "chosen," it was our future. But it didn't feel right, the way it was explained. It felt foreign, somehow cold. And when it came to losing people special to us, it seemed that our only remaining connection to them would be memories and a firm faith in God, who would act almost as a mutual friend between us and our loved ones who had gone on. We just had to wait until we joined them, and even then our religious leaders were unsure that we would even recognize each other or keep our same relationships in that place. Who knew, we might not even care about that stuff. We'd be too preoccupied with all the bliss.
I hated that. I told myself I would like it once I got there. But it was tough to think about. Like most humans, I am someone that needs connection. Family, in particular, is incredibly important to me. It grounds me, makes me feel like I have a home, an anchor in this world. I have depression and anxiety, and for my whole life it's usually been people in my family (both blood and chosen family) that have always pulled me out of bad spells the most. The idea that those ties are only fleeting, that they take a backseat and even disappear in the grand religious scheme of things - I could never stomach that. Those connections felt far too strong and too important.
In my early adulthood, I went through a faith deconstruction. That is something I am not ashamed to share with people. Definitely not ashamed, but terrified. Where I come from, you don't deconstruct. If you do, you failed. You're a scandalous apostate. You've got some nerve to question the divine - you, who came from dust and shall return to it again. And you are no longer appropriate company to keep. I am still working hard on major trust issues that I developed during that process. Even though I went through it quietly and with a great deal of respect for other people's beliefs while I struggled with my own, I had friends completely abandon me, toss me aside as if I were unclean, and never give me the time of day again. I was forced to face the possibility that just about anyone I used to know and love might do the same thing, because I was not one of "us" anymore. I was "THEM." I didn't matter as a person or merit respect for my character and integrity, which I assure you never went away as I went through this personal journey (in fact, I am a far, far better person now than I was before). Nothing is more painful than this sort of rejection and realization, and there were a million hangups formed from experiencing it that I will be working through for years to come. Maybe my whole life.
I do not want to share, at least on a public platform, where I currently stand when it comes to my religious beliefs. For one, I learned during that time of deconstruction that my spirituality is nobody's business but my own, and that one of the mistakes I had made was leaning on people who believed the opposite. Also, I don't feel like publishing what I currently believe because I feel that spirituality is something that is constantly growing and changing, to an extent I never understood when I was younger. Recognizing and embracing that I just don't KNOW - and maybe even can't know, especially on some particular schedule - a lot of things about the spiritual realm has made me so much more of an open-minded and decent human being. There's also a sense of freedom and comfort there. And that brings me back to those magic tomatoes.
One of the first things you ask yourself when you start deconstructing is, "What does this mean for the afterlife?" You wonder if you've just RSVP'd "No" to the heavenly invitation. You wonder if there even is a heaven. If there's a hell. If there's anything at all. If there are ghosts, reincarnations, demons, angels, ancestors look down on you. Or if life is just what you can see and feel. I almost always, through any of my wanderings and wonderings, have held on to the gut-feeling that there's more out there than just what's in front of our faces. More than maybe I even believed when I subscribed to the old doctrine. I am too passionate about and invested in history and family and love to believe anything else.
And then, the tomatoes showed up. "Geez Samantha, they're just tomatoes. They volunteered from the previous year's tomatoes that broke down - that's literally what they're made to do." Yes. I get it. I know that's how it works. But I could not look at those beautiful wild plants, after knowing how hard I had tried to nurture my own seedlings to no avail, and not think that they were miraculous. Especially once I started tending to them - once I used Granddaddy's compost pile to feed them, pine needles from his trees to protect them from weeds, and tomato cages from his tool shed - and saw them thrive and quite literally explode with fruit. They climbed up above the cages, spread their arms wide, and bent under the weight of the tomatoes ripening on them. I would fill the passenger seat of my Pilot with these tomatoes multiple times during the summer. They tasted great - I made a couple excellent batches of pico de gallo with them, froze a bunch of them so that they would last for whenever I needed them, and generally just basked in their glory and abundance. Those plants were superior. They were powerful. They survived voracious tobacco hornworms and they didn't care that I was gone so much during the summer. They appreciated the extra care I gave them, but I got the sense that they were quite confident they would have been fine by themselves too. Call it whimsy, call it an overactive imagination, call it missing my Granddaddy. I know why I was gifted with those plants. They had help. And I know from whom.
And from then on, I've had this extra strength and peace thinking about all the things I don't understand, all the big questions we as humans have about the things we can't see. We don't know, we really don't know so many things. But I know my own gut, I know how I feel, and I know when I'm being bolstered and loved even when I can't lay eyes on who's there for me. Essentially, everything is going to be okay. I think that's what I feel when I think about those magic tomatoes. The universe is big and scary, but beautiful, and life is so much more than we can always embrace and understand - and that's okay. Our heartstrings' ties, our love, the things we feel in our core - those are the closest connections to the truth that we have. And when we feel the heartstrings tugged, whether that's by people right in front of us...or animals...or gardens...or a million other things that we can comprehend with the senses, or by something spiritual that we can't quite understand - we can know that we're being anchored in truth and peace. And then we can smile to ourselves and say it. "We're going to be okay."
I seed saved from those tomatoes at the end of the season. I'd never done that before and it's an interesting and rather strange process in which you actually let the pulp from the tomatoes ferment before separating them out and drying them. I wasn't sure if I did it right, but I really wanted to try and preserve this tie to Granddaddy. I put them in tiny ziplock bags and labeled them "Granddaddy Tomatoes."
Joined by Josh, the love of my life, this spring I began the seed starting frenzy again. So far I have had much more success, thanks to Josh's help and the knowledge I picked up from my past attempts. I'm excited for the gardening season again. I started all my tomatoes a few weeks back, and very quickly noticed something.
I'll give you one guess as to which seeds were the strongest, the quickest to sprout, and the most promising for this season.
Yep. Thanks, Granddaddy. Message received.
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