A lovely tribute from my daughter Mary to her Grandpa Dolan... By: Mary Dolan On Horticulture and Faith, Hope and Home Gardening is an exercise in optimism. Sometimes, it is a triumph of hope over experience. - Marina Schinz I remember standing over the large rectangular raised beds. They were longer than I was tall, perhaps each twenty feet long and three feet wide. My basket sat at my feet and was filled with rumpled, dried clumps. Potatoes. They looked completely lifeless. Dry, withered, showing gray specks where perhaps minerals had accumulated when the water once contained within them had evaporated up to the heavens. They were miserable-looking lumps, but for me the dehydrated, two inch round tubers represented vibrant, large bundles of faith. It was my first time growing potatoes. They were the newest crop that I was experimenting with as I tried to improve my horticultural skills so that I could one day make a home where a vibrant garden would unfold with vegetables, flowers, and animals as I interacted with, honored, and left a mark on the land. Learning how to cultivate them, I told myself, could bring me one step closer to this hope. For months I had researched every aspect of the potatoes that I could. I poured over catalogs of different varieties until it was the middle of the night and the glow from my desk lamp and the moon were the only lights that streamed onto the suburban landscape, which I inhabited as if it were part of my imagined farm in the middle of a pine-scented forest. I read figures about the chemical makeup of soil from my glowing computer screen. I used my calculator to compute probabilities of frost at various dates. I measured readings from a hygrometer at various locations around the house to determine the optimal location for placing the seed potatoes as they dried. Yet now here I was, the lumpy coal-like potatoes resting in a wicker basket as the cool wind snapped around us both. The recently defrosted soil left black smudges on and drew the heat from my fingers that had previously been sheltered in the warmth of my furnace-heated home. All of my practical, logical planning had prepared my potatoes and me up to this moment. It was now time for me to give up control and to hope that my potatoes would find their place in their new underground dwelling. As I pushed aside a handful of dirt to plant the first potato, I imagined my Irish grandfather kneeling beside me. My knowledge of him was limited to family stories and photos; I had only met him when I was a baby. If he were here, I thought, I could learn about gardening and farming from him. From his experience as a farmer in Ireland until his 20s and with the garden plots he kept in urban Albany, New York, he could tell me everything I would need to know about cultivating potatoes. Perhaps he would lean near me, his blue, Dolan-family eyes piercing through the white landscape, as he told me that rather than hunch over my unnaturally bright computer screen and fastidiously compute average last frost dates, I could wait patiently until I saw snowdrops emerging from the soil as an indicator that it was time to plant my potatoes. Maybe his roughed laborer’s hands would grasp a clump of soil, his Irish cap-covered head would turn to gaze about the landscape, and he would know that the soil contained too much clay for my crop. Perhaps his melodic, accented voice would tell me that I had allowed my potatoes to dry out too much. He would not share in the knowledge of the cool, calculated facts that I had computed in my artificially shining room, but would simply teach me to interpret the land. A gust of cold wind snapped through my wool scarf. I closed my eyes and remembered the frigid air that had encircled me as I stood outside my grandpa’s cottage in Ireland. Just as it had been from the time my grandfather lived in Ireland, the white and green cottage still rested in a rural area of County Mayo. The sun was setting, but the white snow reflected the light from the glowing moon and warm hue of the crackling peat fire that had just recently heated both several cups of tea and my now shivering body. The natural, welcoming radiance spilled over the landscape, revealing the gentle rolling hills that rose slowly toward Nephin, the barn in which my uncle kept steadfast watch over the moaning, calving cow who was about to give birth on an uncommonly cold winter’s night, and the piles of dried hay whose scent whisked through the air as the aroma of the cottage’s historically thatched roof had once done. Meandering around the farm, I strolled through the empty field that had burst with fruitful, swaying grains a few months prior, but was now low, brown, and white. Straggling stalks and snow crunched beneath my feet. I reached the rock that marked the location where my great grandfather had left this earth as he plowed the field to prepare for a growing season. I sat by the stone and felt the frozen ground draw heat from my bones and leave brown smudges on jeans. My mind imagined and cradled the experiences I envisioned my family and grandfather must have had here. I pictured them working amidst the hum of Irish accents as they told stories and bent over their crops, placing lumpy dried potatoes into the ground with faith in a substantial return. I dreamt of warmth and pictured my sweat-drenched ancestors in the summer time, mounding up the lush, fragile base of potato plants, carefully not to disturb the developing tubers whose potential growth could fill both stomachs and pockets. And I conceived of my grandfather, a young man my age who was (as my relatives would say) “as handsome as a movie star,” stand where I now sat. I pictured him staring off toward Nephin as he struggled toward the realization that the potatoes widening in the soil could no longer provide enough faith for survival in a county marked by high birthrates and few employment opportunities. Standing up from the hard ground, I lay my hand on the nearby cool stone marker and uttered a goodbye to the visions of my ancestors. I returned over the scrunching ground toward the glow of the cottage’s warm, peat-scented air where I would stay one last night, as my grandfather must have done when his sense of faith outgrew what could have been represented by a small tuber and he put hope in finding a new home overseas.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 23:17:47 +0000
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