Gate: “an opening in a wall or fence…..for departure or arrival” (Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary)

I had run from that old gate so many times that my feet had chucked out a little path which led straight to the shade of my favorite tree. Sitting in the shade of that tree my mind would wander to the galaxies and back ! I would read all my summer library books under that tree and sometimes chase chickens back to the chicken house from there. My favorite tree was a place of wonder, imagination, place of making rhymes and sometimes was the shade where I brushed my new colt, Keppi. As wonderful as that big tree was to me, my mother had a place that was just as wonderful to her, a place she was continually dragging me off to: a place I didn’t want to go: THE GARDEN.

By early April each year my mother had already begun to draw her pictures at the breakfast table. She would take a pencil and paper and sit down, very deftly drawing each end of the garden and each row just as it would look when she and her helpers (?) had finished planting, hoeing, weeding, fertilizing, and tending the garden-to-be. I knew what was coming. I always hoped the garden would grow smaller each year, but alas, it only grew larger. One thing I was thankful for was the Garden Gate. The garden had to stop because of the gate. It was all that saved us from having to tend a “monster” garden.

My mother and father grew up in the very early 1900’s. With them, the garden had not just been a hobby for fun. It had been a life.

I was 12. My mother was 57. My dad was 59. It was 1957. Most of my friends lived in town. None of them had gardens or had to tend one. None of my friends had chickens, rabbits, or horses either. Summertime for my friends was the time for beaches, movies about beaches, tanning, boys, The Canteen, swimming and more beaches.

For my parents, summertime was remembering their childhood on the farm. We had moved to this country home from a very busy intersection in a very busy part of town in Mt. Vernon, Illinois. I had never spent much time in the country except to visit cousins and aunts and uncles who let me see their cows and gave me a ride on the back of one of their “prize pigs” ….a ride I remember because it did not last long. The country home we now had was as foreign to me as another planet. I was trying to adjust. I had left all my friends behind in Illinois. I had left my orchestra behind and all my cousins, aunts and uncles and grandparents. There are some things we can never understand as children. Sometimes it can take a lifetime to understand WHY our parents took a certain path in their lives that seemed to change everything forever.

Today I realize my parents NEEDED this country home. It CONNECTED them to their childhood in ways nothing else could. They became who they really were as my father trained bird dogs and broke horses to ride for the doctor down the road. Once again, my mother was cooking on a wood cook stove alongside her regular stove and drawing water from a well! Although it took me a long time to adjust to what I considered “prehistoric times” I later began to realize the importance of this “bridge” of time in the lives of my parents. They were back to the Earth. They were digging and scrubbing and raising animals. They were going hunting and fishing and meeting a lot of new people who lived this way. My dad took up golf at the age of 59 and it became a passion with him. “OF all things on Earth”, my mother would say, “what he used to laugh at the most is now #1 on his list!” She would say, “I never will forget how he laughed at the foolishness of playing golf! Now look at him!!”

And look at him we all did! We looked at him standing on the hill at the golf club and we looked at him riding his little cart around 18 holes before he ever went to work in the morning! We looked at him as he played in tournaments and as he played alone.

I never saw my dad happier in his entire life. I knew there was something on that golf course that made him gladder that God. I knew there was something in the soil and in the planting of a seed under the hot sun that made my mother not care if she got “eaten up” with bug bites.

I saw my mother in many situations. She reared more children than she ever thought she would and I remember the hundreds of pictures in my mind of her rocking one of my nephews to sleep. As I sort through the photo gallery of my memory, I remember the way she looked on Sundays when we went to church. I remember the way she looked when she sewed at her sewing machine. It seems my mother never got tired. She would SAY she was tired, but what she said was only words because soon she would be up again baking a cake or sewing a jacket. I remember the smile on her face as she sang over and over again the one song she had made up in her entire life: Chicky-A-Dee-Dee Song!

Funny, I’ve never forgotten that song and I probably never will. I heard that song every morning for many years as she sang it to each new baby nephew. She had many faces to her personality. But the Face I remember the most was the one covered by an old straw fishing hat. It was a sunburned face that I saw every summer standing by the Garden Gate smiling her Great Smile as she overlooked and inspected the many rows of vegetables that were soon to be! It was in that face that I saw my mother, the child. When she held the bean crop in her hands or twirled a brand new cantaloupe around; when she found a way to save a tomato plant; when she grew a new kind of bean or pea or whatever that no one else had grown…this was Her Place. This was Her Promised land. This was Her Garden.

Under the old straw fishing hat and beyond the sunburned face, the layered shirts and beyond all the cans of insect spray was a little girl remembering her own dad, her own mother, and her own childhood. I imagine sometimes up on that red clay hill where she planted all the watermelons, she could almost hear her Aunt Florence call her in to make lye soap. I imagine she remembered everything her dad taught her about seeding and planting and the moon and the wind.

I can still see the roses blooming by the garden gate and hear myself protesting as she placed the hoe in my hand. How I counted the minutes till I could lay that hoe down and ride my horse! I took this photo of her garden gate several years ago one summer day. It was one of those stories. You go back to a place you once lived, once loved, and of course, the house is empty and no one lives there anymore. Well, I used to think those words were only song lyrics and no one really did that until I did it. I really did go back. There really was no one living there. The garden gate stood open. Pieces of yesterday started to fit into the puzzle of my life as I thought of all that took place on that land.

When I was 12 how I would cringe when I heard my mother’s voice, high pitched and shrill, calling “Sandeeeee” in beckoning tone to weed and hoe. As for today, it seems there is a huge basket at the bottom of my mind where pages of memories rest, awaiting the attention of my hand.

My daydreams from yesterday, my spinnings of fiction and fantasy have given way to real memoires of real times that have shaped my heart and life. Once again I stand before an old garden gate.

My only question: Am I departing this gate or only now arriving?

Article is copyrighted by Sondra Stallman.
May not reprint without permission from author.