When I was growing up, my mom always made a garden.  Daddy would plow up a small plot between the house and the old barn, and she would tend it after working in the local hosiery mill all day.  She grew tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, cucumbers, 2 kinds of peas, peppers, lettuce, onions, and potatoes.  Dill, too.  We had "rosen-ears" and fresh salads all summer.

Before we could afford a freezer, she canned the items separately — I remember wash pans full of blanched tomatoes and soon-to-be-pickles — as well as mixed together in the best soup I ever tasted.  I was happy to go down cellar in the snow and bring up a few of the pretty pint jars for a hearty winter supper.  We always had "hot tomatoes" to go with the store-bought pintos and cornbread baked in an iron pan.

Longing to taste those flavors once more, after a number of years, I decided I'd have my own garden.  So what if I didn't know much about canning or gardening?  I could learn.

A local handyman plowed a modest plot of ground for me, right beside the deck.  This "bit of earth" reminded me of reading The Secret Garden when I was a kid, inhaling the luscious aromas from my mom's kitchen and saying "Wait a minute" when she called me to help peel, slice, or wash jars.

The handyman said he knew about gardening, and would be happy to plant whatever I wanted. "Corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, and peppers," I said, figuring to start somewhere and work my way into the past.

Eagerly I awaited the first shoots, and was eventually rewarded with green things in neat rows, which I checked every day until there were actually little green tomatoes and tiny pepper buds, and corn leaves waving in the breezes. Anticipation grew as I watched the corn tasselling and blossoms turning to edibles.

I'm a gardener!  I thought, and took snapshots of my plants' progress.  Hoeing wasn't any more fun than I remembered, but there were few weeds and the spot was shaded by the house in the mornings. 

Since I didn't want to use any pesticides, the corn worms soon appeared, but I'd worry about those when I was shucking my own tender corn ears. Another plus was that there were fewer of the fuzzy yellow bean bugs I used to pick off into a jar. 

Mom always planted cabbage, too, but I hadn't wanted to deal with the grubs, and was doubtful about ever making delicious kraut in a clay jug with a rag and rock on top, even if I did have her recipe.  Crunching that salty stalk was always a treat, and having really hot chow-chow to go with winter beans was tempting.  But I knew my limits.

My first fruits were picked young and tender and eaten mostly raw, and I congratulated myself on a successful venture. I foresaw expanding into melons and potatoes next time. And carrots, which had never done well in our clay soil.  While my folks had never bothered with compost, I started mine with the peelings, seeds, cobs and shucks.

Then the three rows of squash vines, by far the healthiest of the lot, began producing so prolifically that my friend who made wonderful squash spice cake begged me to stop sharing, as everyone we knew was surfeited on cake.  On 2 kinds of squash, too, boiled, fried, and raw in salads.

"Well, I hate to see it go to waste," I told my husband, who was the reference person at the public library at the time. I filled a large brown paper grocery bag with as many zucchini as I could, intending to give it to co-workers as we left for an out-of-town visit.

Then mischief took over.  With a felt tip marker, I wrote on the bag:

  Here is you all some
  zuk
  Zuq
  Zuckinini 

  SQUASH

We never learned whether my mystery gift found a home on anyone's table, since not a soul mentioned the incident, and we couldn't ask without revealing ourselves as the perpetrators.

The remainder of the garden dried up in late summer heat and drought, but every spring the memory of the satisfaction of eating the bounty from it returns.  Not quite enough to send me out to buy seeds or look for someone with a tiller.  Maybe next year.