Carrots

I stood at the kitchen’s back window, watching the dandelion fluff drift in the wind, swirling up and then falling with every grace back down to earth. I watched the way that the sun glared down on the browned grass. I wondered if the grass would eventually light up on fire, the sun finishing it off with a nice char. I took a slow sip of my coffee and I let my gaze fall on the rotting swing-set. What had once been a cherry brown wood was now gray, bending down by the weight of years of disrepair. The silver slide once shiny, was dim now, rusting over. I had never been able to bring myself to take it down or give away to the neighbor kids. I’d put the swingset together myself, and I could imagine it there, holding the image of Elizabeth’s toothy grin when she handed me the hammer at my request. We spent hours out there daily on that swingset, her screaming, ‘faster, faster’ as I pushed the top of her shoulders on the swing. Those days, she never seemed to tire. I shook my head at the memories and I begged the tears to stay back. They obeyed. I switched my gaze upwards towards the bright sky and I followed the crow as it swooped through the yard. A crow, of course, I said to myself, mesmerized by the black figure’s dives. But when the crow disappeared, I knew that I was avoiding casting my face to the garden. And this avoidance wouldn’t last much longer, I would cave, I always did.

         I thought about how the garden looked before I let my eyes lay on it. I already knew was done for after the deer’s rendezvous in the raspberry bush, the chipmunks’ burrowing into the bean plants, the slugs’ tomato feast, and the weeds’ growth that choked out the carrots. I almost didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to think of the before, when Elizabeth and I turned over the garden with rakes and emptied the garden of any weeds or remnants from the spring harvest. We bought the seedlings and tucked them into the soft earth with the purest love. We would patiently wait for them to flourish, gifting them drinks daily and ensuring that no critters got too close. Almost daily, Elizabeth would read to them. When she was ten and far behind her class with her reading level, I told her that reading to plants is scientifically proven to improve plant health. 

“You’re joking,” she’d said, twirling the leaves of a tomato plant between her index finger and thumb. 

“I am not,” I’d replied, keeping my face as serious as I could manage.

“Why don’t you read to them then?” 

“I don’t have no time to read to them,” I said, not admitting to her that I too struggled with reading. 

“Really?” She said, standing up, a hand on her hip, giving me goosebumps because I wondered what she’d be like as a teenager, already she had an attitude. 

“Why don’t you try it and find out. A scientific experiment.”

She sucked in her lip like she does whenever she’s processing. And thankfully, the part of her that was still a gullible little kid kicked in. She ran off into the house and returned with a Judie B. Jones book. She plopped herself next to the carrots on the edge of the garden and started reading aloud. 

“Good, you keep readin’. I’m going to get supper started,” I told her, already walking towards the house, not wanting her to ask me a question that I wouldn’t be able to answer. Elizabeth kept reading to them long after she’d realized I’d tricked her. I could still hear her voice as she read, flipping through books faster than anyone I knew. It wasn’t really a surprise when she found her job and had to move away. It simply happened too quickly.

       I grounded myself, feeling the warmth from my coffee cup in my hands. I took a long sip, closing my eyes, hoping to switch off the memories and instead find pleasure in the sensation of the milky, sugary substance as it danced on my tongue, but it didn’t come. The taste was not luxurious in any way. And then I let my eyes fall on the garden, unfeeling. The tears that I’d resisted held themselves back. The garden was quite large, taking up the space of most of the left side of the yard. There was the swingset on the right with a long strip of grass stretching to the house and then the left was filled with the garden. Of course, it wasn’t a huge backyard, but the garden was large enough to keep the two of us occupied for a few hours everyday and nearly all day on Saturdays. We only took Sundays off.

         Looking at the garden, I pictured Elizabeth over again, her eyes bright with determination and the sun dancing across her nose as she dug holes into the garden bed to plant the sunflowers that she insisted on each year despite my plea that the plant only brought about pests. She would remind me of the deal we had. When she was six and we started the garden, she imagined it filled with flowers. I’d imagined it filled with fresh vegetables, herbs, and fruits that we could use for food and to have a stand once a season at the farmer’s market downtown. 

“I’m not gonna help then.” Elizabeth’s arms were crossed, her bottom lip sticking out into a pout.

“This was gonna be our garden. What happened to you being so excited about it.”

“What’s a garden without flowers?” 

“It’s a garden that’s even better. We get to see how tasty what we plant is? It’s better than the grocery store. Wouldn’t it be cool to have a grocery store in your own backyard?” I asked. Elizabeth’s arms slowly uncrossed. “How ‘bout this, we plant one flower that you pick out every season and the rest will be food.”

“Only if we plant a lot of carrots,” Elizabeth said in a tiny voice.

 She decided on sunflowers. Everyone in Georgia plants sunflowers.

“It’s a cliché,” I said. But she didn’t know what that meant and it didn’t matter, because she’d already fallen in love with the great yellow flower. So she planted one every season, except this one, but only because we had run out of time. Her job had started too soon, the interview, the offer, the start day. The week it happened she was a hurricane, speaking in rambles of excitment and running all over our little town to say good-byes. She packed in flurries, “do you think I’ll need this?” she’d ask me, holding up a t-shirt or an old stuffed animal. 

“Take everything you need baby girl.” 

“That’s not helpful, Mama.” And she would throw the item into the give-away box or one of the new suitcases she’d purchased to bring with her. There were just a few things she left in her room, a stuffed bear, a few cotton dresses and old t-shirts from soccer teams, camps, and high school.

The day she got into her car to start the long drive up to Massachusetts for her new job, she told me not to forget to plant her sunflowers. That I would need them. I rewatched the scene over and over again, the sound of her voice, so professional and clear as she told me good-bye, that she would come home for the holidays, told me to remember the sunflowers, and to take care of myself. I promised her I would. And on the phone, I told her I was just fine, that the garden was thriving. And she bubbled about her job, how it was still just entry-level and she was still stuck getting pointless tasks like organizing folders, but it was a job and she was making friends. And I beamed with pride.

         But I hadn’t touched the garden. That pride faded into loss when we hung up. Days sprawled into weeks that were all a blur. I spent my days leaning over toilet seats, scrubbing them clean in the kind of houses that I hoped my Elizabeth would one day be able to afford. When I returned home I slipped into the bath, making the water so hot that it would nearly scald my skin. I scrubbed at the grime from the day’s work. And I cried. My heart would fall deep into my stomach just as it had the day she left, and I would shake. Only by sheer will power could I pull myself out, towel off my aching body, change into my cotton nightgown and crawl into bed. I reminded myself that she would come back. 

         The crying stopped the second month. September. I went through the motions, sweeping floors, dusting shelves, making beds. On the weekends I’d stay in bed, ignoring Saturdays that were made for the garden. I would watch hours of television, cook occasionally, and when Sunday rolled around I’d bring myself out of bed to Church, but it was more to save face that it was to pray. After the service, everyone would ask about her excitedly and I would feign a smile and boast of my child’s success. I didn’t mention that while Elizabeth shined, I was falling into this place of complacency. I once heard that depression isn’t about feeling sad all of the time, rather, that it is worse, it is the lack of feeling. 

         I sucked in my breath as the heat from the coffee slowly disappeared into the air. I took another drink, but the cold of the coffee reached my tongue and I set the mug down on the window’s ledge. Before I realized exactly what I was doing, I’d opened the back door of the little house I’d bought with all of my savings and inheritance money when Elizabeth was three. My feet walked me towards the garden. I stared over it, feeling god-like as I towered over the destruction.

         Almost instinctively, I started grabbing at the weeds, yanking them out slowly at first and then with great force. As if they had personally caused me pain. As I pulled weed after weed, I felt the wet on my cheeks, the tears that fell in fury. For hours, I lost myself in pulling the weeds, my bare feet against the earth, my leathered hands bleeding as I pulled on the thorny weeds, tossing them out of my garden. 

I almost jumped when I saw the garden snake slither through the patch of dying tomatoes. And then I laughed for the first time in a long time, recalling the first time the snakes got into the garden, how afraid Elizabeth had been, but I knew better. The snakes were harmless. 

I sorted through the wreckage of the plants surrounding me, and found that most of them were dead. The tomatoes had mostly fallen or were eaten through. The raspberry bush was dried out. The herbs were unrecognizable, blending in with the weeds.

         It was then that I saw the bit of orange peeking through the dirt. Carrots. I went over to pull it out, gently. The carrot was brilliantly orange and huge, bigger than any carrot I’d ever grown. I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was the only thing alive in the garden besides the critters. I smiled, not fully comprehending how it had managed to survive the months of drought. After scavenging the garden for any more signs of plants in need of harvesting, I took the carrot inside and washed it off in the sink, rubbing the bits of earth off of the carrot’s rough outer edge.

         I took a bite of the carrot and grinned. It was sweet, raised perfectly, even all on its own. A miracle, I’d thought. Or perhaps just dumb luck. Or maybe it was all those years of cultivating the perfect soil. I smiled to myself, thinking of Elizabeth chomping on the carrots and her insistence that we grow more and more carrots every year. Her favorite of the vegetables. I wondered if it was too late to plant her sunflowers. I thought that perhaps I could plant one that would bloom by the time she came home for the holidays.