Free Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart by Carol Wall Page B

when older kids were forming their teams.
    As I pondered these memories, I was vaguely aware of Giles going back and forth to the garage for supplies. He handed me a familiar-looking garden claw with chipped red paint on the wooden handle, and I began to lose myself in the work that was nearly as old as the planet itself—scraping, digging, and mixing to prepare the soil for what it did best.
    While I worked, I fell under the spell of other memories. The effect was hypnotic. Even my awareness of Giles faded as I was transported to a solitary hemlock where I used to stop for a rest as a child walking home from school. I hadn’t thought of it in years. In my vision, I was sitting in the grass beside the compact tree with feathery-looking, dull blue branches stretching over me. There were bright yellow dandelions around the skirt of the cotton print dress my grandmother had sewn for me, and I was still young enough to feel sorry for children whosegrandmothers didn’t sew and, therefore, sadly, had to buy their dresses from the stodgy women’s clothing stores downtown. I wasn’t on a schedule and had no checklist for the day. All I knew was the happy hum of living in a household run efficiently and lovingly.
    I remembered also how I skated down the steep-pitched hill of Sleepy Hollow Road with older children, at a breakneck pace. Or, as the sun began to set, how I climbed my yellow apple tree to the very top with a library book tucked under my arm. I played touch football with neighborhood boys and was a noted wide receiver (even
if
a
girl) in our flat front yard whose curving limestone sidewalk formed the perfect undulating fifty-yard line. Breezes carried the delicious aroma of tender roast beef and buttered biscuits wafting out onto our football field from Mama’s kitchen. She loved to watch our games, but at some point I realized that what she really wanted was another baby and another. She wanted happy, healthy children to fill every corner of her home, to make up for the losses she had suffered. Instead she had to settle for two, me and my younger sister, Judy.
    Finally, with the ground prepared, I picked up the gloves and draped them on the fence. Giles and I stood together, looking out across the creek.
    “Are your parents living, Giles?”
    His eyes grew soft. “My father is deceased. But he had a very interesting and eventful life. His first wife was killed by lightning on Lake Victoria. This would have been in the early forties.My mother, age twelve or thirteen at the time, was brought into the household as a babysitter to my father’s motherless children. He was an herbalist, within our tribe. Very much older than my mother, who still lives. She was only fourteen when I was born. We are very close, and when I go there, we choose to spend much time talking, and can talk almost forever. She remembers everything. She likes to laugh.”
    “I can picture it easily, Giles.”
    “She is scarcely five feet tall, yet smart and resourceful,” he continued. “It is said she delivered me as the sun was setting, and then took me out with her to do some chores. Many taller people on the island still look up to her.”
    “Did she have other children?”
    “I have three sisters and one elder brother who live. Four brothers were lost in childhood. Their ailments seemed to be mysterious. I always thought it may have been a heart arrhythmia, but no one knew for sure. Out in the humid air playing with other children of the village, they simply collapsed, one when he was quite young, and the other, a few years later. I have worried about my own sons, fearing an inherited disorder. Oh, how my mother grieved. I remember her slumped over their lifeless bodies, wailing, unable to be consoled. They were wonderful, lively brothers and friends. I did not have time to say goodbye. We thought we had them, but as the islanders say, it seems they were merely visitors, after all. They ‘went back.’”
    “Went back? That’s a