Lying in his bed tonight, Reed asked me to tell him about when I was a kid. I told him about spending days with my Grandfather. I used to ride on the back of his old tractor as he plowed furrows in his field. His ‘garden’ was a bit bigger than a simple garden, but not quite a farm; an acre of food ready each year. I’d ride on the tractor with him as he plowed. Then we’d set seeds in the field. I remember squatting down over the fresh dirt and poking little seeds into the soil with a finger. He told me I had just the right size fingers for that. 

The field was irrigated with a pump that drew water from the creek which ran across one corner of the land. On summer days, we’d sit on the bank of that creek and fish. Which in hindsight was more a matter of sitting and playing with worms than ever actually catching anything. I remember once the splashing as a great catfish got reeled in, but otherwise it was simply little perch and the like that got tossed back. 

I recall when the plants had grown, seeing the cabbage and the okra, the corn and the beets. I know he grew snaps, too, but can only remember them–not in the field–on the porch at the house as my Grandmother showed me how to snap the ends off just so before she canned them. It was a simple little screen porch, just off the kitchen of their house, with a door that always slammed unless you were extra careful and slowly put it back just so, but I remember it seemed that a lot of work went on within it. I remember canning up lots and lots of food in mason jars that would again be emptied back out over the course of the winter. There was, I think, a basin of water, but I’m not sure what it was for. I wish I knew the process Grandmother used to can the food. It seems like the sort of very useful knowledge that nobody seems to have anymore. Instead we just drive to some store and get food there, never really thinking about what it takes to grow food, raise it, cultivate it and preserve it. 

Thirty years later, my Grandmother still makes the effort to can up little jars of preserves for us at Christmastime. It’s the sort of gift you can look at and simply say “Thank you” or you can stop a moment, consider what it took to actually make something for someone, and the love that goes into that gesture. It’s the sort of thing that makes me wistfully pine for a time in the seventies, before the internet and cell phones, when battery-operated toys were still a rarity (Batteries are for flashlights!). I used to climb trees; my kids climb playgrounds. I used to play with ants and honeysuckle and marbles, not bubble guns or video game systems.

And my Grandmother’s phone? It had a really, really long cord.

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