Flicka weeded the dill field by hand, and Dicka pinched potato bugs to death with her bare fingers. And that was just yesterday at Waldoch Farm in Lino Lakes, a place with acres of plants, a garden center, greenhouses, farm animals, honey bees, and later in the season, a corn maze and pumpkin patch.
I don’t understand the appeal of gardening on this scale, but my girls do. And they love it.
“Maybe you’ll find your Boaz,” I said one day, “and he’ll leave some extra grain—or kale—for you to pick up and bring home to me.”
My farmhands begin their work in the fields at seven o’clock in the morning and return home by two in the afternoon. Though lively, the recap of their days sucks the energy right out of me. It’s because Flicka planted all the okra or labored in the tomato tunnel, and Dicka hoed for four hours straight, and I can feel it as they talk, and now I’m back in the 1970s and 80s, and I’m hot, thirsty, itchy, and lazy all over again in Grandpa’s garden.
Way back then in our childhoods, my sister Coco and I “worked” the long rows of vegetables because we weren’t given a choice. We stuck together, squandering our time as close to each other as possible, while Mom, curved like a hairpin over the green beans, toiled in another area of the garden. As she bent over, the bottom of her shirt parted from the waistband of her pants, exposing a sliver of skin across her low back that browned nicely in the sun, and we could mark the passage of time by it, knowing when it was a rich bronze, we’d have to go back to school.
Coco was a better listener and follower of instructions than me and set to the task of weeding with a marginal level of commitment. I dug up pebbles with little sticks or nibbled the white roots off blades of grass or scrambled away to the old pump to fill one of Grandma’s metal drinking glasses with sediment-laden refreshment.
“Hey, try this, try this,” I said after logging a solid two minutes of work in the garden. I clambered to my feet, folded forward at the waist and let my head hang between my legs, gazing through them and behind me at the long rows of plants. “Now you have to run as fast as you can.”
I demonstrated my head-between-the-legs run, always plunging headlong into the soil and getting a dirt-packed scalp to take home with me. And maybe I talked Coco into trying it too, but I don't remember that part—only her laughing.
Mom straightened to standing now and again and thoughtfully evaluated all the progress we hadn’t made. “Girls, you only have five-thousand more rows to weed,” she calmly said.
Or at least that’s the number I heard.
Nowadays, I lack green thumbs and a vegetable garden, but at times I imagine tilling up the lawn and scattering seeds for cucumbers, beans, and peas anyway. Will Coco move in to weed my lettuces and carrots while I amuse myself by running willy-nilly around the property, though? See, that’ll determine if I do it or not.
I’m spending this weekend with Coco up on the farm. Maybe we’ll walk where that garden once sprawled, and we’ll tell more stories, the haze of the decades obscuring them, coloring them, and maybe I’ll drop them on your doorstep next week, ring the doorbell, and run—just like what you do with too much zucchini in August.
Let’s just see what happens.
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*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.