The Turtle's Beating Heart by Denise Low

Author:Denise Low [Low, Denise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 9780803296534
Publisher: UNP - Bison Books
Published: 2016-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

23. Dorothy (Bruner) Dotson, age fifty, in Emporia, Kansas, 1965. Photographed by H. C. Dixon at Granada Studio for the fiftieth wedding anniversary of Carrie (Strittmater) and William H. Dotson, Dorothy’s husband’s parents. Author’s collection.

As I write these memories, in the wickerwork of alphabetic reality, I conjure Grandmother Charlotte, my mother, and great-grandparents I never met. I am still playing dolls with my sister as I rebuild the dollhouse of our family. The dolls also are my children and grandchildren, existing in that floating interdimensional space of words, where they come to life when bidden.

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Into her eighties my mother kept a small garden of tomatoes, asparagus, squash, and green beans. The common pole beans can be eaten green or left to ripen and dry in the rows. These were the beans that Delawares and other Algonquian peoples use for winter storage. My mother also had a cutting garden of chives, spearmint, lemon balm, sage, thyme, and oregano. Often she planted the annual herbs—parsley, basil, and cilantro.

I was not surprised when, years later, my uncle told me about the large gardens my Delaware grandfather and grandmother tended. “Victory garden” was one term he used, from World War II, but even before that crisis, the habit of farming was ingrained.

My mother had her own memories of her grandparents’ garden. She remembered sweet shelled peas from early vines that went so well with new potatoes and fresh cream. She imitated her family’s example, and so do I.

When I was a newly married woman, I lived in an apartment with an attached garden, and there I planted the “three sisters”—corn, beans, and squash. I mail-ordered “Indian corn” because I wanted to see ears of red, blue, white, and yellow kernels. The seeds arrived, I planted them, and they grew quickly. One night I dreamed of them as people coming to life, one for each color. The next morning I saw they had grown taller than the neighbors’ sweet corn. They had more scanty foliage and smaller ears, but the stalks towered—perfect anchors for green bean vines. The variegated kernels were shiny and robust. My neighbors considered them a curiosity, along with my irregular rows interrupted by hills of corn. These contrasted with their tidy plots measured out with string. But I sensed the “ornamental” (so-called by the seed catalog) Indian corn had strong vital force. I plant corn whenever I can, just as I saw my mother do, and Indigenous varieties when possible.

Corn is natural in this part of the country, easily cultivated along sandy river bottoms. Traditions remain from the old days. My mother taught me to plant fish in each corn hill, small perch I caught at a nearby pond.

In the Great Plains sunflowers are another staple, an important source of oil. Some varieties have edible roots, “sun-chokes.” An Arikara woman told me how women planted several varieties of sunflowers with corn along the river bottoms, then left for the hunting season. When they returned in late summer, crops were ready to harvest.

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