by Steve Christensen

Created on: February 16, 2010   Last Updated: March 10, 2010

Mom and Dad would never have considered themselves avid gardeners. They occasionally planted a plot of vegetables when they were young, and Mom was enamored of roses and pansies which she raised in beds outside our front door, but many growing seasons passed when they didn’t sow a single seed.

Sadly, the mischief wrought by glaucoma, arthritis, and other age-related maladies prevented my parents from gardening at all during their later years.

Despite my own limited exposure to horticulture, the loose-knit tapestry that comprises my earliest memories is plaited with gardening vignettes: thrusting my small arms into warm, freshly-dug soil; pressing my face against the cool, smooth globe of a pumpkin; following Dad down leafy rows as he tugged bulbous roots from the earth and placed them in my inadequate and overflowing hands.

“Just a few more,” he’d say, though we’d only covered half the row and I was already leaving a trail of radishes in my wake.

I was in the second grade when we moved to Casper, Wyoming. Dad had taken a position with the Bureau of Reclamation, and our family was among the first to resettle an abandoned subdivision of barrack-style homes that had been built during Casper’s oil boom. The yards surrounding these structures – although they might have once supported flowerbeds or vegetable gardens – were untended and weedy.

I don’t remember if my parents were happy with the state of things, but we kids were delighted. Hummingbirds buzzed around hollyhocks that crowded against the eaves of our garage, and cat-faced spiders hung from tenacious webs stretched across the window frames. The lawn was so overgrown that we eventually built labyrinths within the grass, and an immense old cottonwood arched over the front of the house. From the tree’s venerable limbs, we gazed down upon the entirety of our new domain (and, before we made a rule that abolished such “cheating,” we frequently climbed its bole to locate the concealed participants of our hide-and-seek games).

If we were delighted with our new home, then our aging beagle, Boots, was ecstatic. As soon as we arrived and her four white paws touched down on that Wyoming soil, she was in hot pursuit of a family of rabbits who’d apparently grown complacent and lazy in our back yard.

As the dog’s bell-like baying erupted into the afternoon, Mom suggested that we might need a fence to exclude the wildlife. “I don’t

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>