The Garden Gate

The Garden Gate

Children ride the garden gate

Not aware it might unhinge.

That chore of worry is for watchful parents

Standing somewhat crooked

Back-pressed by a gloved hand-heel

In the bountiful row of red tomatoes.

The garden work of children simply

The squealed glee of childhood.

Innocence experimenting with the squinching

Rusted hinge calling all able hands

To Summer’s sweet whiffs

Musky soil harrowed around

The tempting fruits of waning daylight.

Within each gardener

A sense of reward for daily toil

Far from the pleasured memories

Those layering childhood lessons

Stamped in the blossoming minds

To be carried long as remembered times.

The baskets of vegetables,

Those wide brimmed wire-handled, leg-spreading

Heavy, back heaving woven carriers
Filled with color;

Red, green, or orange,

And textures;

Hairy, prickly, or smooth and of scents

Sour, sweet, acrid or erotic.

No child of a gardener goddess

Forgets those pussy-willow soft years

Leading up to gardening as “dirty” teenage chore.

Each sensation of a grandmother’s garden

Is stored and binds family as one life.

A place where shredded, sliced and diced

Offerings are tasted and liked or “patooeed”;

When family dinners exhaust words muttered mouthed-full,

And family rituals, no matter how seldom

Shared, are felt as certainty and pride of relatedness.

With time the gate hinge opens

Others go in and out

Creating their own world

Trying new angles of light, water and seeded soil.

Children walk off to school, then fly

Driving away from graduation,

Shedding rice after sworn vows,

Bearing children and someday too,

Fixing the gate and tilling  good soil.

Then once upon a day

A life nears closing time.

 The elder assumed family journalist

The one always outside the pictured

Rituals that make family a house-hold

Is stricken and changed.  Her body turns on her mind.

Where once she stood erect and watchful,

Where measured stride was effortlessly fluid and wild,

Where yard-sticked new ones  measured inches of pride.

And  too, those children now parents

Still offered hard earned confidence

A salve on a world of impossible sprains

For those parents of children growing to soon wise.

No longer bent above the rows,

Unable to hoist the wire-handled harvest to wagon

She stands by, unable to wildly swing the hammock held child.

Somehow the new squealers seem more joyful

To the greying grandmother.

And time offers no reward for a life pressed hard

Against decades of twisted and turned

Cucumber vines of career journeys--

A new set of children dirtied in new-turned rows

Their houses now in towns

More rooms but less dirt for the growing plot.

Places where no gate harbors the harvest

For the new faces and voices.

Then, a gift is offered.

And a life becomes memories of that specially rolled crust--

The perfect golden custard squash pie;

A measured life goes beyond prime fruitfulness.

Courage enlightens through an unpredictable

Fractured future to become wisdom gifted. 

At last, she is released from knowing when to let

The tortured body’s clock unwind, when to leave

The chase in the biological accounts of young stout hearts.

When do we let the land have its way with us?

When will it take back its fuel for its perpetual renewal?

Maybe after hearing one last time, “Close the gate,”

As though the sanctity of humanity needed secure latching.

She holds us now to a silent creed;

An ancient nurturing instinct, a dance

Ever so gently and gaily performed and taught.

Her grace spoken:

“Enter the garden lovingly.

Swing on the gate you little rascals. 

Sprout and continue my never-ending story.”