Gardening and vegetables are part of her life, a lifestyle fast fading.

I didn’t think to ask her name, so the story is shot full of holes, definitely not the journalism they teach in the schools. It isn’t about life or death or that gray area wedged in between, stories so compelling kids just out of college who’ve never attended a funeral can make them come alive. It was, after all, just a short conversation about vegetables.

“Do they have any tomatoes out there?” she asked from behind the counter. I was hunting a copy of the municipal budget, hot on the trail of the bureaucratic story we reporters too often survive on while our readers are left starving.

“All I saw was flowers, begonias maybe.” With that answer I had exhausted a major portion of my knowledge of flowering plants.

“No trucks with vegetables for sale?” she continued. I guess she was unable to sneak out from behind the counter at that time and check for herself, the demands of public service being what they are.

“I didn’t see any.”

I got my budget and went looking for coffee. Public buildings usually have a good supply if one can find it, and usually much cheaper than the $1 or more it costs these days to fill up at any restaurant. They were, unfortunately, between pots.

I headed outside and found a bench. Reading the budget didn’t take long, and as I was headed back in the inquisitive woman was ducking out for a smoke. She drew conversation from me easily, like a summer breeze rustling through poplars. Her face inviting and her manner open.

“I’m ready for some fresh tomatoes,” I said, relishing the summer thought of thick slices and black pepper between slices of any kind of bread.

“Oh, it’s early for tomatoes, but there might be some,” she said. She listed a few early vegetables she and her husband were already harvesting, then she veered off into the meat of the story.

“My husband just likes to garden, likes to just get out there and tend it. I put up 80 jars of beans last year, and we break’em out when we have dinners. I like to have dinners, like to have people over,” she said, the words sounding more down east drawl than mountain twang, but maybe I was mistaken. It was country, though, through and through.

“People just don’t like to garden anymore. Used to be everybody had one,” she said.

She had already knocked me out of my normal breakneck work mode, so we chatted on a few more moments. Driving back to the office the budget story was relegated to the back seat, pushed from view by this woman and her vegetable tales.

My own feeble attempts at gardening over the last few years have been beaten back by weeds and inattention. I simply don’t have the time, a truth I use as weak justification for my stops at the grocer and vegetable stand to get tomatoes, peppers, carrots and other summer goods I could be growing.

I guess I’m not alone. Fewer and fewer people, it seems, find the time to grow vegetable gardens. I’m not talking about large-scale productions that require extensive knowledge of soil, seeds, and crop science. I mean backyard plots that depend mostly on time, on turning the soil, making rows, planting, pulling weeds, perhaps setting up a few stringers or sticks, and a little watering. As I drive around the neighborhoods in Western North Carolina, I see fewer than I remember as a kid growing up. Now, it’s just easier to buy.

As I drove along, I thought how that change was reflected in the country we’ve become, how we mirrored that wise woman’s words. Economists describe us as a consumer society, a people consumed by buying things. That description has become commonplace during the same era that our manufacturing sector has gone south. We don’t make many things in this country anymore. We have watched as textiles, steel, paper, cars and hundreds of other products have come to bear the stamp of other countries, places where workers are paid lower wages. Places where, I suspect, many workers supplement their livelihood by raising vegetables, perhaps hunting or fishing.

My mother doesn’t do it anymore, but she could whip up biscuits from scratch if she had to. No recipe book, no back of the flower bag to tell her how long she needed to cook them, just the knowledge in her head. She knows how because at one time she had to.

Growing a vegetable garden is not going to slow life down so that we can begin to make sense of everything. It’s simply a symbol of how we are changing, one of those generational vestiges slowly disappearing, another of those links to knowledge of natural, old ways and the earth’s cycles that we are losing. Turning the dirt isn’t liberal or conservative, Yankee or Southern, educated or ignorant. Perhaps it does say something about social classes, as those on the lower end of the economic scale probably gardened out of necessity rather than pleasure.

But the lady was right. Fewer people do it.

“When all of my family comes over, there are nine of us, and I get out three or four jars,” the woman told me. “That’s what I do.”

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)

 

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