Vegetables 2021

On a farm less than ten miles away, where I am fortunate to be offered space, I have a garden in one long row.  It’s a much straighter row this year.  I was subtly provided a string stretched tightly between two stout steel stakes. 

Last year, my first on the farm, I made the mistake of not looking behind me while planting.  My row was shorter and bowed out in both directions, zigging and zagging so much that the farmer who lends me the land couldn’t cultivate next to my row.  I learned not looking back may be a life strategy that has its place, but that place is not found in a garden.

I’ve just caught on, after nearly 70 years, to the important-sounding botanical family names of these familiar plants.  I was slow to learn.  But now that I’m there I’ll throw them in.  Here’s how I filled my straight row, starting from the east. 

Thirteen Brassicas-3 Brussels Sprouts, 4 Dino Kale, 4 Red Russian Kale, 2 Broccoli.

Forty-six Nightshades-not counting potatoes.  First the Peppers:  5 Serrano, 5 Habanero, 2 Cayenne, 2 Jalapeno, 3 Sheepnose Pimiento, 3 Lunchbox, 2 Shishito, and 4 Jimmy Nardello.  26 total.

Next the Tomatoes.  8 San Marzano, 2 Early Girls, 2 Orange Beefsteak, 2 Pink Beefsteaks, 2 Red Beefsteaks, 2 Jet Stars, and 2 tomato cousins, the Tomatillos Verde.  20 in all.

Lots (too many to count) of Amaryllidaceae, the formal name for the onion family.  I planted nearly enough shallot, red, and yellow onion sets to fill out the row.

 The row is capped it off on the West End by a member of the Daisy Family, a single Mexican sunflower, for the sheer hell of it.   

 Earlier in the spring, in a separate communal plot, we planted four rows of potatoes.  Oddly, they’re nightshades like tomatoes and peppers even though they grow underground.  We buried reds, cobblers, fingerlings, and exotic yet controversial purple potatoes under nice black LaSalle County soil.

I love the hidden life of potatoes.  The reveal when you dig them.  That, compounded by the satisfaction of knowing you made them multiply by simply cutting and planting a chunk of raw potato with an eye in it, makes potatoes a simple but wonderful crop.   The cutters, planters, diggers and tenders of those potatoes will dole them out in equal shares when we harvest them at the end of the season. 

At my house in town, I have horseradish, oddly an underground member of the mustard branch of the Brassica family, asparagus from the aptly named and I assume small Asparagaceae family, and rhubarb of the Polygonaceae aka buckwheat tribe.  How buckwheat relates to rhubarb I’ll never know.  All that stuff grows perennially.

I planted cukes and zukes (cucumbers and zucchinis), both from the Cucurbitaceae family, in my previous garden plot by the garage.  My former town garden looks so small compared to the row in the country.  The old garden space is now partially but increasingly shaded by a young volunteer oak tree, likely planted by a squirrel burying an acorn.  I was going to transplant the oak seedling to keep the garden in full sun but waited too long.  Instead, I sacrificed my original small garden plot for what I expect will be a nice big shade tree for someone else.

I also have big pots of herbs off the kitchen with several kinds of Basil-Tulsi, Thai, and Sweet along with Rosemary and German thyme all from the Mint family.  Rounding out the herb pot is Italian flat-leaf Parsley, an Umbellifer.  If I had planted one more particular plant, I would have created within that herb collection the famed quartet of Simon and Garfunkel spices.  But I don’t use sage much, so I left it out.  But you know the tune.  If you don’t watch out it will become your earworm for the rest of the day. 

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?

We also have two big pots of chives, the smallest and skinniest member of the onion branch of the Amaryllidaceae family, which are much more than we need and out of control.  They come back each year no matter how little care we give them.

I was out at the farm last week watering.  Gardening seems so simple at the beginning.  The ground is bare except for the plantings.  The beginnings of weeds may be there, but they are tiny and easily ignored.  At some point, they explode, and weeding becomes frantic.  Unfortunately, when you water your plants, you water the weeds too.

Then comes the staking of the tomatoes.  Pinching off early blossoms and suckers.  Tying vines gently to rigid structure with strips of cloth.  It takes some time.  And despite all our efforts, it is the weather, more than anything we do, that largely determines success.

I’m always relieved when the plants are in the ground.  It is only then that I appreciate each trip to the country.  It gets me out of town, looking at what’s new on the farms I pass, admiring cows still in pastures, and witnessing the explosive growth of Illinois corn and beans in those giant fields.

I swear each year the fields grow larger, farmhouses and barns grow fewer, while the new architectural kings of the Midwest countryside, silver grain bins with propane tanks and steel sided pole barns for massive machinery, multiply like rabbits.  There are fewer animals and people out there all the time.  It’s beginning to look like an ag factory on a grand scale, complete with all the charm factories exude.

But I just tend to my row.  I swear that country garden kept me alive and sane during the pandemic.  I think I’ll always remember realizing (or did I know all along?) that life goes on no matter how dire threats become to us humans.  I was standing next to the pepper plants one day when it hit me.  The sun was where it should be.  The sky was just as big.  The breeze blew the same as always and the plants were not fazed.

Plants are so much simpler and more focused than humans.  They stay put and live out their purpose without a lot of screwing around.  Their purpose is simply to grow and reproduce.  Thank God for plants to hang on to when everything else seems to collapse around us. 

I’ll let you know how the garden turns out.  Maybe I can explain how those vegetables taste.  We’ll see. 

Saying Good-Bye

 

Dale and his sister Pat, the first of Francis and Lucille Flaherty’s six kids were Irish twins.  You know the definition, right? Born within a year of each other.  Often, as in this case, to Irish Catholic parents.  Pat arrived May 21, 1940, a day shy of her big brother’s birthday in 1939.  Every child was a blessing in the Flaherty family. 

In the 70’s I was working with a devout Catholic man at the LaSalle County Juvenile Detention Home when he and his wife celebrated the birth of their seventh child.

“How many kids are you two going to have Ed?”

“We don’t know.  It’s not up to us.”

I’m pretty sure that’s what Francis and Lucille believed regarding God and the gift of children.

Dale’s birth was followed by that of three baby girls.  Then, in 1950 when Lucille was 41, in a final hurrah, identical twin girls arrived.  Dale was 11.  The twins’ first memories of Dale were as a high school student at St. Bede Academy.

I visited Dale at his home in Florida along with his four remaining sisters, and three of their husbands.  I was one of the brothers-in-law.  I married Colleen, one of the twins.  We gathered to support Dale’s wife Pat and their children: Kathy, Carrie, and Jeff.  They were all helping Dale navigate hospice care.  He had a serious stroke a month earlier, and then another.  It was bittersweet.

During the five days we were there, lots of family stories were shared.  Nearly every story made someone cry and someone laugh.  We all have different triggers when it comes to grief.  Dale, as the oldest and only male, is universally viewed by his sisters as the favored child.  I don’t doubt that’s true.  “Prince” is a term that often came up in that regard. 

Dale was a huge sports fan.  He loved all the Chicago teams but especially the White Sox and the Bears.  Weekends often found him in the living room on O’Conor Avenue in LaSalle watching the Sox on the family black and white console TV, wearing his Sox cap, scoring the game in his spiral-bound score pad, and listening to the play-by-play on both TV and radio.   The twins remember trying to get his attention but instead drawing his ire.

“Scram twins” was the response they remember.  It didn’t stop them.

“SCRAM TWINS!”

Dale yelled loud enough to alert his mother to his problem.  Lucille would invariably stomp into the room and scold her two youngest daughters.

“Come on twins, you know better.  Get on out of here now.  Go outside and play.  Can’t you see Dale is trying to watch the baseball game?”

Dale was smart in school, especially in math.  Not only did Dale have a slide rule he knew how to use it.  After graduating from St. Bede, he went straight on to Marquette University in Milwaukee and majored in electrical engineering.  He used to ride the train home.  His Mom and Dad would pick him up at the station in LaSalle.

He always brought his laundry home.  Sometimes if he couldn’t make it home, he would mail his dirty clothes back to LaSalle in a metal box.  Lucille would wash and fold them carefully, repack the box with clean clothes, add her son’s favorite baked goods, and mail it back.

Dale married an Irish Catholic girl named Patricia O’Malley from the Beverly neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago and went to work for Motorola.  Then they started having kids themselves.  But they stopped sooner than their parents.

When I became acquainted with the Flaherty family Lucille had already passed away.  Francis was alone.  Dale and his wife Pat took over the family dinners.  The Flaherty’s had their big holiday get-together on Thanksgiving. We would gather at Dale and Pat’s house in the Chicago suburb of Woodridge.

Dale liked being the host.  He had a bar in his living room where he made us drinks.   Always lots of kids around, glad to see their cousins.  Francis and Lucille’s six kids loved being with their Dad and each other.  They made outsiders like me feel instantly and thoroughly welcome.

Though I got to know Dale in the suburbs, I could always see the farm kid in him.  Maybe it takes one to know one.  Both his parent’s families owned land in Dimmick Township south of Mendota.  As a kid, he helped his Dad and Uncles from both the Flaherty and the Lyons families with farm work.

Sometime after I joined the family, the Flahertys gathered for a funeral at the small Sacred Heart chapel in Dimmick.  No plumbing in that tiny Catholic church.  Stately outhouses instead.  The dinner after the funeral was being held at the Grange Hall in Troy Grove.  It came time to leave.

“Follow me,” Dale said.  A little train of cars followed Dale as he turned off the blacktop and headed north on a gravel road.

After several dips and turns on little-used roads, we magically popped into Troy Grove. When we parked and headed into the hall I caught up with Dale. 

“How’d you know that route Dale?”

“I used to haul ear corn to the elevator in Troy Grove on those roads with a tractor and a box wagon before I had a license.”

He grinned.  I could see in his eyes how much he loved being back in the country.

When they got rained out of the field, Dale used to go with his Dad and Uncles to his Aunt Marguerite’s bar in Troy Grove.  Dale would have cokes and play pinball as the grownups had shots and beers and solved the world’s problems.  He went with those same Uncles and his Dad to LaSalle-Peru football and basketball games.  At home, it was Dale and his Dad with all those girls. 

Like his father, if Dale had disappointments he hid them well.  They were gentle men, those Flahertys.  You couldn’t help but like them.

Francis seemed to take great pride in Dale’s accomplishments.  That could be because Francis was unable to go to college.  The depression brought harsh challenges to farmers who owed money to the bank for their land. Francis began farming as soon as he got out of high school to save his family’s acreage from being repossessed.  He gave up his dreams, even delayed his marriage to Lucille, so he could provide for his family.  He could have seen the future he once dreamed of for himself through Dale’s eyes.  We don’t know, because Francis would never say a thing like that.

After a few years with Motorola the company paid for Dale’s MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern.  In addition to all his knowledge, Dale brought calm to every situation he encountered.  He explained things simply and understandably.  He was kind and had a great laugh.  Motorola put him in sales.   

Selling took Dale to Europe and the Far East as business and opportunities expanded.  He loved the travel but hated being away from his family.  After big changes in electronics, and forty years at Motorola, Dale finished his career with smaller companies.  It forced him to work farther and farther from home.  He never complained, at least not to us.  As long as he was with his family, everything was good.  Former farm kids appreciate simple pleasures.

How could our visit to Florida not be bittersweet?  The strokes Dale suffered took away his ability to speak.  His hospital bed was in front of the lanai facing a small lake he loved.  There were two chairs on either side of his bed, usually occupied with family members talking softly to Dale or simply holding his hand.  There were a lot of tears, from both Dale and his family.  It was, I imagine, as emotionally draining for Dale as it was for us.  I was glad when hospice began doses of oral morphine.  As the days went by, Dale became calmer and slept more. 

I tried to stay out of the way and be helpful.  I cooked, joined in conversations about earlier happier times, and mostly stayed out of those chairs flanking Dale’s hospital bed in deference to his wife, kids, and sisters.  I say that, but at the same time, it was difficult for me to sit in one of those chairs. 

The last time I was that close to the death of someone I loved, it was my mother.  I was in charge of the staff who were providing care for Mom at our farm at the end of her life.  They called me when they noticed a change in her demeanor, her breathing in particular, and I made the drive to Danvers immediately.  I didn’t leave for five days, and I was with her at the end.

The hospice workers were wonderful.  With their help my siblings and I were able to complete the sad task of helping a family member end their life in dignity and peace, comfortably, assuring them they are loved, all the while trying to be strong and cheerful.  It’s an impossible task. 

But there was a difference between being with Dale and working through my Mom’s last days.  That was 1996 and I was 45.  I didn’t see myself in her place when I sat beside her.  Death seemed far away.  Not so on this trip.  I turn 70 in August.  This time, the struggles of the person I saw dying I imagined as my own.

I waited to have a longer talk with Dale till we were alone.  I took a chair next to his bed early the morning before we left.  I talked to Dale about June, my first grandchild, a three-month-old charmer.  When I did big tears came to his eyes. 

“You were so lucky Dale to be able to watch your grandchildren grow up and become young men and women.”

His grandchildren had visited Dale as a group the week before. When I mentioned his grandchildren, he closed his eyes and nodded.  Big tears rolled down his cheeks.  I didn’t want to make him sad.

“Remember that day we watched the Bears beat the 49ers in the rain?”

His eyes opened.

“I googled it.  It was November 27, 1983.  Maureen (our daughter and first child) was born in June.  It was her first Flaherty Thanksgiving.”

“We were at your house in Woodridge for dinner on Saturday and stayed over.  The weather forecast for game day was bad and no one else wanted to go.  Pat (Dale’s wife) thought you were nuts to even think about going.  You asked me to go to the game as soon as we arrived.  I said yes right away.”

Dale smiled.

I googled it because I wanted to remind Dale of the game the way I knew he saw it.  I was never that much of a football fan, but Dale knew the players, their stats, team standings, the over-under, everything. 

“I’d never seen Walter Payton play in person. He rushed for 68 yards.  McMahon outgained him.  But it wasn’t about the offense.  McMahon threw that one long pass to McKinnon.  Remember?  49 yards.  It was the only TD in the game.  The Bears defense held Joe Montana and that good 49er offense to one stinking field goal.  They were so tough.”

“The Bears sacked Montana five times.  McMichael had two.  Singletary, Dent, and Wilson all had one.  They forced them into four turnovers and recovered every one of ‘em.”

Dale’s eyes brightened.  He was a numbers guy. 

“San Francisco was a class team.  They went to the playoffs that year and were one game short of the Super Bowl.  You said you’d been waiting for the defense to come together like that all year, that those defensive players would take Chicago to the top.  A year later they won the Super Bowl.”

I’m sure he remembered all that.  I wanted in some way to take him back to that day.

“It started raining hard during half-time and didn’t let up.  The wind swung around and began to blow off the lake.  It dropped about 40 degrees during the third quarter.  Damn near everybody left in our section but you and me.  Remember?”

He smiled.

“You said it was Bear weather. ‘Just the diehards and the crazies now.’  We laughed and laughed.”

He opened his mouth and tried to laugh.  The look in his eyes told me so.

“After we got soaked, I remember a guy in the stands wearing a black garbage bag one with holes for his arms and neck.  I asked if he had more, and he pulled a roll of them out of a sack and gave me two.  Anything to cut that cold wind.  We wore them all the way back to the parking lot.  Tore them off and threw them in the trunk.  We couldn’t get the heater in the car going fast enough on the way home.”

I paused.  Dale kept looking into my eyes. 

“Thanks for everything Dale.  I’m so glad I got to know you.  We’re going to stay close to Pat and your family.  We love you guys.”

Dale’s eyes closed.  I squeezed his hand, walked out through the lanai, and sat by the lake.  There’s no good way to say goodbye to people you love.  You make it up.  You do the best you can.  It’s all part of the deal.