I grew up intimate with vegetables. It was no one season fling, no April to August affair, but a succession of seasons blending into seasons. My parents, Clint and Mary Searl, kept a large garden on their acre of land, in, what was in the 1950s, rural Northern Delaware. In spring we planted. In summer we harvested. In autumn and winter we lived off a cache of canned and frozen produce.
My mother's parents, German-speaking, Austro Hungarian immigrants, had a truck farm in South Jersey. My mother, along with eight brothers and one sister, had worked the Walter family truck farm. When the siblings married, most of them stayed in South Jersey. Of course, they all kept their own gardens, competing among themselves for the earliest, the biggest, and the tastiest.
On most Sunday afternoons, the Walter clan spontaneously gathered around the faded-oilcloth covered, oversized kitchen table. Whenever I grew tired of playing with my cousins, I drifted into the kitchen, where I perched on a cast iron radiator beneath the window. I listened to boisterous talk and glanced through copies of the Farm Journal that set on the windowsill. Thinking about the Walter clan now, I'm reminded of a flock grackles worrying a little plot of ground – bobbing about and fighting with each other over little tidbits, real or imagined.
My father enjoyed antagonizing my mother's brothers. Most of them worked in a Mobil Oil refinery on the Delaware River. He called them thickheaded Dutchmen, a corruption of Deutsche, meaning German. They were Democrats, union men, and fiercely loyal to Walter clan's prejudices.
To a brother and brother-in-law, except for my father, they were passionate growers of white corn. The Walter boys and my always animated aunt Eva spent hours extolling the virtues of their favorite variety – Stowell's Evergreen. Yield was important and so was resistance to disease, but sweetness and tenderness were the ultimate criteria. For them, it was literally dessert after the day's big meal. And my grandmother usually had a big pot of boiled ears set on the stove for snacking during corn season. Often, to accent a point, one of my ham-handed uncles would wave a half gnawed ear at whomever he was arguing with.
Maybe just to be contrary, my father grew yellow corn – Golden Cross and Iowa Chief. Not only did he live on the other side of the Delaware River, he was a Republican and nonunion worker, too. He certainly egged on the Walter clan, taking every opportunity to assert to one or all of my gathered uncles that yellow corn was infinitely superior to all varieties of white corn – but especially to Stowell's Evergreen. The ensuing discussion would grow noisier and noisier until everyone was shouting across the table. And my mother would enter the spirit of her clan by getting angry at my father for antagonizing her easily excitable brothers.
In my memory, I can hear her voice beginning to admonish, "Oh, Clint…” (She was in her heart of hearts a white corn person; but for my father's sake her garden grew only yellow corn.) The Walter boys would finally shout, in a chorus of frustration and derision, that yellow corn was really only fancy field corn, fit for horses and not for human beings, as though that settled the argument.
Because my father was a yellow corn man, I bent that way, too.
I rarely see white corn. A compromise version of yellow and white dominates the marketplace. When I do come across a white ear of corn, I remember those long-ago arguments around my grandparents’ oilcloth covered kitchen table.
I called home for the names of the white and yellow varieties they argued about years ago. On the phone, Dad said it took him 50 years to convince Mom that yellow corn was indeed superior to white corn – especially Stowells’s Evergreen. Remembering the Walter clan deep prejudices and unending loyalties, I asked incredulously, "Is that right, Mom?"
"That's right, son," she admitted with such an incredible sweetness in her voice that I was reminded of the taste of the yellow corn of my boyhood.
[
I’m straightening up after your father. He leaves his things all over the house. He drops his shoes and socks wherever he takes them off. I’m always picking up after him.
You know, he’s beginning not to care about a lot of things.
And he’s starting to get forgetful. He’s forgetting things more and more.
[Give me an example.]
The other day I looked into the kitchen and the freezer door was ajar. He never closed it after he got ice. I told him. So he went to fridge and began to fuss with the stuff inside. He was trying to find what was blocking it from closing. He got frustrated. You know how he gets when he can’t solve a problem.
Well, I finally got up from my chair and took a look for myself. There was an ice cube stuck by a hinge. He’d looked and looked. He fussed with everything in the freezer that might be blocking the door, but he didn’t see the ice cube. His eyesight is going.
Oh, he can read the newspaper and see the print allright. But he’s just not as sharp as he once was and that frustrates him. I think that’s why he doesn’t seem to care about things like he once did. Well he is ninety-four and a half years old. What can you expect?
Do you know the year’s half over? And June is half over, too. Where does the time go?
You know, I’m a lot more feeble now than I was six months ago.
[I’m sorry for you.]
Don’t be sorry. That’s the way it goes. It’s nothing. Life goes on.
Yesterday when we went to the restaurant with Roger and Ruth, Roger had to help me in and out of the car. He walked beside me as we went in and came out. And I use my cane all the time. But I’m so slow. I’m an old lady, you know.
When we returned home I told Dad, You know I’m getting awfully feeble
I know you are, he said.
[I am sorry.]
Please, don’t be sorry for me. I’ve had a good life. I’ve seen my children grow up, then my grandchildren, and now my great grandchildren. Who could ask for any more than that? Dad and I have had a good life.
Just wait. When you get to be ninety-three, you’ll think differently than you do now.
In late summer on an exquisite, sun-drenched day, I took my octogenarian parents, Mary and Clint on a country drive, from their Northern Delaware home toward the Amish country of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Along the way, we stopped at a famous rose nursery. Among the displays were towering hedges of red roses. We walked among the hedges, savoring the aroma and ogling the bountiful blooms left au natural.
Mary, then in her early 80s, was examining a burst of blooms that were particularly alluring. “Which is the most beautiful rose?” I asked.
She didn’t hesitate but touched a succession of roses from the tiniest bud through one far beyond full bloom, with withered petals. “Each one is beautiful in its own way,” she said simply and without the least affectation.
