Goldie's Garden

Goldie's Garden

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. I was the fourth son at age seven. We moved in with my mother's sister, Aunt LaVerne who had four children of her own aged 7 to 17.  None of us children got along very well at first, us being the tough kids from New York and them being 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 blonde 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 by either a hunter who had mistaken her for something else or just one of those mean-spirited people who like to shoot anything.

Goldie was buried on a rise at the end of the garden she loved so much and she was sorely missed all that winter. That was the worst winter I can remember. Weather wise it was nothing compared to what we were used to in New York but my mother had not yet saved enough to get us a trailer of our own and space was scarce in my Aunt's small house when the days were too cold to venture outside for too long. We were a family coming apart at the seams.

But that next spring something happened. Something miraculous that brought us together in a way nothing else could have. It started with the garden. Grandpa Cecil had tilled it under again in the spring and put the seed and little plants out just like he always had and again, the garden was way too big for him to handle. But something had changed. At the very end of the garden, on the rise on the highest end he had erected a cross about four feet high. On the board that ran horizontally he had carved the words "Goldie's Garden" in letters at least 6 inches high with a wood burner. The cross itself, made of two by twelve planks, was painted gold.

I went into the garden while he was setting in some of the first tomatoes and asked him about that cross. He told me that this was and always had been Goldie's garden. That he planted and tended it when Goldie was a just a pup and enjoyed spending time out here with her. He told me that, in fact, he was still spending time with Goldie out here in the garden. That her body was feeding the soil and her spirit was watching over the tender young plants, chasing out the rabbits and mice and running up and down the rows.

I guess he could see the skeptical, New Yorker's expression on my face. He said, "If you don't believe me, grab a hoe and start a new row for the corn, like I showed you last year. And listen, not just with your ears but with your heart."
I did, and as I did I felt that long winter's sadness start to slip away. I could hear Goldie running up and down the rows. I remembered the way she would roll in the dirt and smile and seem like the happiest animal in the world.

I started spending a lot of time in that garden. And it wasn't long before all of us kids, Southerners and Yankees, were out there working and talking about Goldie and everything else from school to the things we experienced before we came together. We had a wonderful garden that year and every year after that. By thanksgiving of that first year, Goldie's Garden had brought us together in a way that nothing else could have just at a time when we were about to tear ourselves apart in our ignorance of what families are supposed to be.

I am forty six years old now and live in Nebraska. I have very fond memories of the latter part of my childhood and the cousins I grew up with. Especially of working side by side with them in Goldie's Garden and discovering how much we really had in common. In the cool mornings, before I go to work I look out at my own modest garden in the corner of my yard with the tomato plants coming on strong and the cucumber vines growing like mad and the snow peas coming in and at the very back, a gold makeshift cross with Goldie's Garden burned into the wood, and I think that just maybe a bit of Goldie and Grandpa Cecil are out there as well. Keeping watch and tending it right along side me and my children.