Mister Owita's Guide to Gardening: How I Learned the Unexpected Joy of a Green Thumb and an Open Heart by Wall Carol

Author:Wall, Carol [Wall, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

12.

Lemon

My mother’s recovery from her stroke was slow, but by the first warm days of spring, I started to feel optimistic again. At least I didn’t worry every time I walked away from Mama that I might never see her again. So Dick and I decided to treat ourselves to a three-day getaway to our favorite mountain inn in North Carolina.

The weekend went well, and we both felt refreshed on the drive home. Dick complimented me on my low-cut cotton sweater and admired my newly purchased blue jean skirt. We laughed to think how shocked our kids would be if they suspected we were still in love in the standard, hearts-and-flowers way, despite our creaking joints and gray hair.

Occasionally, I looked over at Dick and admired his handsome profile and his strong, freckled forearms. We’d now been together significantly more than half our lives, but I hadn’t ever tired of him. That was one positive by-product of my jealous nature, I supposed. I never took him for granted. I brushed my fingers through his combed-back, silvery hair. Whenever he complained of growing bald, I always assured him that I thought it made him look distinguished. After all these years, the secret to our success was really pretty simple. He was still my guy.

When I was twenty, beginning my sophomore year in college, my parents gave their consent for me to marry Dick, who was a year behind me in school. Dick’s parents were thrilled, and I suppose the unspoken understanding was that at least we were doing things in the right order—marriage first, pregnancy later. In a small town like Radford, people pulled out their calendars when a young bride started showing, doing their quick, nosy math to figure out if the bride and groom had really waited until their wedding night.

In high school, Dick had been known as a liberal troublemaker whose family came from somewhere up North. He wore wire-rimmed glasses when they were practically synonymous with being a hippie, and he let his hair grow long and scruffy, so it touched his ears. Worse, he made no secret of his dislike for LBJ, and he clearly hadn’t been born saying “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir” the way the rest of us good Southern children had been. He’d even been one of two white students to join with all the black students in our high school to protest the playing of “Dixie” by the marching band at the start of each pep rally. They all walked out of the school gymnasium en masse, and that damn song was never played at a pep rally again.

None of the above presented a problem for my parents. In fact, they admired Dick for his beliefs. But it definitely gave Mama a gulp of concern that Dick was—gasp—a Catholic. It was downright comical to imagine it now, but this was at a time when being Catholic was seen as something exotic, even heretical, in my tiny, blinkered town. Folks had vague associations with mystical-sounding incantations and praying to statues.

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