I saw it, yesterday, thrown over the back of the rocking chair in my mama’s house. She was keeping the children while I planted. I put in on. It is soft and gray, with a few holes here and there.
As gardeners, something we really love to do, when we can, is save some of the harvest from the previous year to enjoy while we are at work on that crop for a new season. A frozen muscadine juice slushy while we are pruning, blackberry cordial while we dig up and transplant the unruly shoots, a corn casserole in the oven while we hoe the rows. I’ve even been known to take venison stew to the deer stand, but that’s a bit much, I admit. It’s a beautiful thing to connect the years to one another and to make sure you are considering, not just the task in front of you, but where you’ve come from and where you’re going, what you’ve been given and what you hope to share with others.
The garden sweater feels similar to that. It’s as old as I am, at least three decades. For a few years, in my teens, it disappeared. And then one spring, as we pulled up the walkways to lay fresh bark, we found it buried there in the mulch. It had weed roots intertwined in the wool, and earthworms falling out of the sleeves. Mama laughed, washed it, and put it back on.
We’ve had favorite aprons over the years, but that sweater is the truest uniform we’ve known. It feels like putting on the earth. It’s seen the garden through good times and bad, and literally been buried, but not forgotten. But the best thing about it to me, is that it’s Mama’s, like this place and like myself. To us all, she’s been faithful. Faithful to plant, to weed, to admire, to hope for better things, and it’s only right she have a garment like this, as eternal as Spring itself.
When I finished planting the seedlings (Celebrity, Barnes Mt Orange, Lollipop) I came inside to wash the dirt from my hands and I got the last jar of canned tomatoes down from the top shelf of the pantry. Then I walked up the hill to get my children from my mother. When I walked in the door she was holding the baby who looks like her father. This delights us, every day. We see him again, in this tall blue-eyed fair-skinned happy boy.
I forgot to return the sweater, but that’s alright. Mama knows she’ll find it another day, around here somewhere.
I cannot love this enough! In the deserts of Arizona it’ll be the straw hats that get buried and resurrected, if anything. Lol. I love the idea of caring something you made from the previous seasons harvest with you when you plant the new crops! Love it!
I must see this sweater, which lay in the heart of the earth only to rise again.