Planting

Phil and Bob had been best friends in high school. Phil married Bob's sister. Both men grew up to have three children. Phil moved to Texas and worked for an oil company after he did his stint in the Army. Bob went to college, then went into the Army for two years. That's just what people did back then--they served their country. It was after Korea, but before Vietnam. Neither Phil nor Bob saw any action besides the fights they got into with the other GIs who would make the mistake of getting into petty scraps with them.

Bob continued to live near Chicago after his honorable discharge from the Army. He moved back in with his mom and dad, and he didn't miss his sister, but he felt sorry for Phil. He knew what the poor guy would be subjected to all too well.

Eventually Bob married a nice Italian girl. They were both teachers, and they went on to get master's degrees. Then they moved to a small town. It wasn't idyllic, but it was nice enough. Phil's oil job was no fun. He started job hunting and found a supervisor job in one of the factories in Bob's small town.

It was the very early 1970s. Land development wasn't like it was now. Bob met a wizened old woman who had a farm near a cemetery. At one time the farm had been outside the city limits, but the town had slowly encroached upon it. Bob and one of the other teachers at work yearned for a garden. The old woman staked off nearly a quarter acre of her land and told them they could plant their garden within the staked boundaries. "How much would you charge us?" Bob asked.

"Pay me in green beans and potatoes. I can them. It saves me from having to go to the store. If you have extra produce your families aren't going to eat or want, I'll take that off your hands, too. I'll take just about anything," the lady said.

The garden produced beautiful fruits and vegetables. Bob swore it had to be from the runoff from the neighboring cemetery. He brought home eggplants the size of his head (his mother said he had a very large head, and giving birth to him was enough to make a woman give up having more children). His children helped him in the garden. He would have one dig a very shallow hole with her finger, and then one of the others would follow behind her and drop seeds into the hole. One of the others followed behind her and covered the top of the hole. Bob would follow along behind the girls, and he would gently water the row of newly planted seeds.

After Phil moved to Bob's small town and again became part of the fabric of Bob's life, Bob and his garden partner invited Phil to use part of their farm plot. The three men didn't have trucks, and found themselves taking all of their gardening tools with them in the trunks of their cars. Phil had a Buick Park Avenue that did double duty, ferrying the kids to Sunday School and taking large iron tools back and forth between home and the garden.

When they needed a tiller, the lady who owned the farm already had one in a storage shed, and she was so happy to see this ancient piece of equipment being given a second chance. She enjoyed seeing all of her garden tenants' children, and when they came with their fathers, she would ask them to prime the water pump. The kids would work diligently to get water to come out of the well, but it usually took some adult intervention because the pump was awkward. There was some kind of special magic needed.

There came a time when the lady of the farm became 102 years old, and she couldn't live alone anymore. She couldn't drive, see very well, or hear, and she didn't remember things like turning off the stove or closing the doors or windows when it was winter. The following spring, Bob, Phil, and their garden buddy lost their garden plot.

Bob began growing flowers and select fruits and vegetables in his backyard. Phil grew a lot of tomatoes and cucumbers in his backyard. The teacher opened a realty company. After some time, Bob's sister grew weary of Phil. Phil had grown weary of Bob's sister, but they mostly stayed out of one another's way. One day, Bob's sister said she was tired of being with Phil, and it was time for him to move out. Phil and Bob were confused, and Bob felt his sister was all bluster, but Phil moved out.

Phil, middle-aged and employed, became a hot commodity in Bob's small town. He was snatched up very quickly by a young widow. Bob's sister was incensed that Phil didn't want to fight for her. Phil's answer was, "She threw all of my clothes onto our front lawn in front of our children. She didn't even have the decency to tell me she was unhappy. She didn't offer me the chance to make things right."

And some men needed to be in a relationship maybe more than they needed their next breath. Phil remarried, and with his new marital circumstance came a new home, and ten acres of land. "Bob, we aren't done with gardening, you know?"

The two of them planted pumpkins, zucchini, watermelon, corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, spinach, strawberries, beets, and some other odds and ends they anticipated wouldn't fare well.

From year to year, the garden expanded and contracted, and Bob and Phil had more aches and pains as they bent or kneeled in the dirt to plant or harvest, and they didn't have their own small children to help with the planting like an assembly line. The two of them would discuss football, baseball, basketball, politics, books, and their steadily declining health. The pockets of their Levi's held cotton handkerchiefs for mopping the sweat on their brows. As their sweat increased and intensified, their patience with one another decreased equally, ending in two old men bickering--sometimes loudly with shouting and name calling, and sometimes with laughter and a beer.

Bob's youngest daughter came for a visit, and he took her to the garden. She sat on Phil's back porch watching her dad and uncle do their thing in the garden. She soaked up the sun, noting that the two old men didn't wear hats or any sun protection, and as the time wore on, she witnessed the enthusiastic bickering that was the longtime love, history, and friendship the two old men shared.

When Bob and his daughter returned home, Bob's daughter told her mother, "They're very cute out there in their garden. But if one of them is found dead in the garden, don't presume it's natural causes."

As it turned out, the oxygen released by all the plants in the garden wasn't enough to save Phil. He had to let go of the garden in exchange for a portable oxygen tank, and Bob couldn't bring himself to garden without Phil. Eventually, Phil's dog, the moles and voles, the rabbits, the deer, and the squirrels made short work of what was left of the garden. And even without the backyard garden, these elderly men reminisced over the photos of more than thirty years of cultivating their lives and gardens.