Victory Garden Redux

KATHRYN JONES

April 11, 2020

Seeds I saved and stored in paper packets,

descriptions and dates scribbled on the fronts: 

OKRA – 8/19/18

CUCUMBER – 9/20/19

BASIL – 11/2/19

BUTTERNUT SQUASH – 3/20/20

RED CHILES – 3/25/20

Hope scattered on my kitchen table,

the beginnings of my victory garden. 

My grandmother planted one during World War II, 

and every year until her death – a big Southern garden

of collards and mustard greens, turnips and beets. 

My father planted one during the first big oil crisis,  

fearing he might lose his job and not be able to feed us – 

tomato plants staked in the ground and a fig tree,

clumps of grapes hanging heavy from the arbor. 

I planted gardens, too, not out of desperation or hunger 

but for pleasure, for the process, for the joy.

Then spring arrived and planting took on a new sense of urgency.

I pressed the seeds into starter pots with compost and a prayer. 

Romaine and leaf lettuce sprouted first, then spinach,

and green onions grown from severed roots, makings for a salad. 

Asparagus stalks shoot out of the ground like fingers pointing skyward,

heirloom tomatoes dangle their yellow lanterns of blooms,

zucchini plants unfurl their leaves like umbrellas to shield the heat.

I head out to the garden every morning and walk down the rows, 

looking to see what’s new. I go back in the afternoon to water,  

communing with the plants and telling them what’s going in the world, 

why we need them to bloom, be happy, thrive, produce. 

They tell me, with their new shoots and buds, to do the same thing. 

I spot the first ripe strawberry and pluck it from the stem, 

admire the blood-red flesh, sniff the sweet tang,

pop it my mouth, close my eyes, and see my grandmother

stooping to pull up turnips, and my father,

picking purple figs to slice and splash with cream.

This is my first taste of victory. 

KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and  a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.