by Brian Bishop

Created on: June 30, 2007

Living in Hell's Kitchen, in the Bronx, New York, I had no idea what a garden was. In fact, in those days you would have to walk 10 blocks to Jerome Park just to find a tree or some grass. And you just didn't walk 10 blocks in my neighborhood unless you were with a very large group or were carrying a howitzer.
In 1968, my mother moved us from the Bronx in New York to a small town in Alabama named "Bleeker". It was just her and us five boys ages ranging from 3 years to 16. We moved in with my mother's sister, Aunt LaVerne who had four children of her own aged 7 to 17. I was the fourth son at age seven. None of us children got along very well at first, us being the tough kids from New York and them being simple country folk. They resented having us intrude on their life and we felt like outsiders in a world we knew nothing about. Also living on my Aunt's property was my Grandmother "Nannie" and my Grandpa Cecil. It was Grandpa Cecil and his dog Goldie who kindled my love of gardening and brought two entirely different families together.

Goldie was a beautiful Reddish blond Labrador Retriever and was the most even tempered animal I have ever known. Until then, I had no idea that a dog could smile much less laugh and act joyously. Every evening that first spring and summer you could find Grandpa Cecil and Goldie out in the garden, him pulling weeds and moving dirt, Goldie sniffing up rabbits and snakes and running up and down the rows of corn and tomatoes. "The Garden", as we first called it was much too big for a man in his early seventies to handle and was mostly overgrown and weedy. Come harvest time, more often than not, much of the vegetables would simply fall off the plants or just rot hanging there and Grandpa would turn them back into the soil with his tractor.
Grandpa tried more than a few times to get us feuding kids out into the garden to help him work it but we generally wanted no part of it. We would work out there for an hour or two and then just disappear off to do whatever we could find to do on our own. But we all loved that beautiful dog and would steal him away every chance we could. I would spend hours on end walking in the great woods behind the house with Goldie running ahead scaring up rabbits and birds.
Then one Autumn day, Goldie came up missing. We all worried that something bad had happened to her and sure enough, Grandpa Cecil found her in the woods on a tract of land behind ours that belonged to the paper company, apparently shot and killed

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