by Richard Holmes

Created on: May 18, 2009   Last Updated: October 26, 2009

THE SUMMERS AND THE GLADIOLAS

When I was very young I lived with my Aunt Bess and Uncle Hank for three years. That was in the late 1940's when I was about ages four through six.

I don't recall very much, if anything, about my life before that time when I did live with my mother and father. I especially don't remember the day when I moved from inner city to country life. But I do have a lot of pleasant memories from those years with my new family.

My Aunt Bess doted on me hand and foot. She was one of the most gentle person I have ever known. But it is my Uncle Hank who fascinated me then and still does decades after his death. It seems strange to me now. My memories of him are few, far fewer than they are of Aunt Bess. I do remember seeing him coming and going to work everyday. He worked for the railroad, not on trains, but in the yards. He wore a dark uniform that had a distinctive, but not unpleasant, smell to it. Each weekday he would come home late in the afternoon and sit in the same chair in our small cottage living room and read or listen to the radio. Quiet by nature, he didn't talk much to anyone, least of all me. He was never unkind. He was just a quiet man.

Although the memories I do have of Uncle Hank are few, there is one which remains far more clearly than any others. It was his garden. I can still vividly picture it. It was not a vast garden of tomatoes and peppers and onions or any vegetable. He had no vegetable garden. His was a garden of flowers, actually one kind of flower only. We called them gladiolas. Today i guess they are more correctly called gladioli. But my whole family always referred to them as Uncle Hank's gladiolas. It was a small garden only about 20 by 30 feet. It was right alongside his garage and it had a white picket fence around the other three sides along with a hinged gate. I never opened that gate and I never walked in that garden. In fact, I don't remember anyone else ever venturing inside...except Uncle Hank.

Each year this little garden was a rush of colors...white and red and purple and yellow and pink and orange. Relatives who visited , neighbors who stopped by, would always admire the gladiolas more, it seemed, in wonder and awe than to compliment the gardener.

I can still see Uncle Hank tending his gladiolas every weekend for hours. Barely able to peer over the picket fence, I used to watch him and what seemed so strange even then was that he was a man who worked in the railroad yards and who came home in oddly smelling clothes but who spent every weekend for months caring for his delicate gladiolas. There were dozens of them and he treated each like he might treat an infant child he and Aunt Bess never had. In spring he would be sure that the first signs of the shoots were protected from an early frost.. As summer came and they grew tall, he would stake them to prevent the wind from blowing them over. Each fall he would dig up the bulbs and put them away somewhere until planting time the following spring.

I never saw him or anyone cut a single flower for indoor decoration. In fact, I don't remember anyone even asking him for one. Everyone just admired them. This little plot of land was, I think, my Uncle Hank's sacred ground, his private garden of extraordinary beauty.

In the short time that I lived with my Aunt Bess and Uncle Hank, of one thing I am certain-that I looked forward to the summers and the gladiolas.

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