Nature's Nurture

My parents were famous gardeners—mostly vegetables for consumption and canning—later freezing. My Mom had grown up on a family truck farm in Southern New Jersey and was an expert.

Before they could afford a gasoline cultivator, my Dad tilled the ground with a one wheel hand plow. In his wake robins dared to forage for earthworms. The texture and aroma of the loam in early spring remain with me from more than half a century ago.

Into the ground went the distinctive seeds of the respective plants: carrots, beets, yellow and green beans, zucchini, lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, and of course corn. Also into the ground went the tomato and bell pepper seedlings that had be nursed along in a hot house sash arrangement on the sunny side of the chicken coop.

Chickens scratched and clucked, laying their eggs inside in straw lined roosts. Year after year the earliest vegetables were the asparagus spears that poked from a long bed at one end of the great garden. Here there was also a compost pile of grass clippings, clean kitchen garbage, and in high summer season overgrown zucchini. When they began to ripen the zucchini hills were impossible to keep up with. (“Betcha’ never smelled a real compost pile before!”)

I didn’t go to kindergarten, Mr. Fulghum. I learned about Nature from Nature first hand, not via a little seed in the Styrofoam cup. I didn’t need to be taught wonder. It flowed from Nature. I was filled with simple awe that has proved to be abiding by the seed planted into the prepared soil, becoming fruit with new seeds in it; fruit that I ate and grew. It was a simple realization that life goes on in spite of death.

In the distance of time, it seems every day of my childhood and early youth was spent in part outdoors, wandering the woods among the trees, a cross a meandering stream with minnows, crayfish, and salamanders, up and down hillsides studded with great blue granite boulders, and into a cornfield that had once been a Leni Lenape settlement where arrowheads could be found by searching the furrows between the rows. Seasons didn’t slide by as much as they gracefully edged toward, out of and into, then feathered away from each other.