The garden.
But not one, not just a simple garden but almost a separate farm, a separate life. There are four gardens, four completely different plots. The potato garden, the corn garden, the kitchen garden, and the garden garden.
They are life. More than the farm, more than the crops and the animals, the gardens are life—all food. There is never money, not ever, not even small bits of change, not one extra dime to waste and food from stores—“store boughten”— is simply too expensive except flour, sugar, salt and pepper, and canning spices. It is unthinkable to buy meat or potatoes or other produce, totally outside thought.
And so the gardens.
An aunt called them the soul of the farm, said the fields of the farm were the body and the house the head and the garden the soul, and she would go out each morning after chores and breakfast, before dishes and day work, and walk through the rows with a cup of steaming coffee held with both hands and talk to the gardens—not wasted talk, not silly talk, but talk as she would speak to another person.
“I was thinking last night of grandmother’s quilt,” she would say to the cucumber plants. “She used the colors so well I thought I would try such a quilt, just try and see if I could make it look as pretty as she did…”
And nobody laughed, not even a smile, because the garden was as much a part of the family as the people, so important that it was worked separately from the rest of the farm.
— Paulsen, Gary. Clabbered Dirt, Sweet Grass. Harcourt, 1992. 43-44.
