Memories of Martha and Lorraine

I spent a good amount of time on my grandparents dairy farm while growing up. My grandmother, Martha was 71 years of age when I was born yet I knew her for 30 years due to her longevity of life. When you do the math, she was 100 when she passed in her rocking chair (at home) while reading either the Milwaukie Journal or the Oregonian newspaper. Her yard was always an inspiration to me. As long as she had mobility she kept it immaculate. Nary a weed was found! She had beds of bushy, blooming perennials and a couple rows of pink fragrant rose bushes. Along the side of the sleeping porch she had a small tree that when you rubbed the large teardrop shaped leaves they smelled like peanut butter. In the back she had Bing and Royal Ann cherry trees. At her back porch she had bushy fig tree that she would pick and eat the figs right off the tree.


Another inspiration to my gardening interests was my Mother-in-law, Lorraine. Before she moved to Portland from the San Joaquin Valley I have heard that she doned a garden wherever she was living no matter how hard and dry the soil was. She always leaned to vegetable gardening, although she did have flower beds. When I met her, after her move North, she loved to grow things that provided her somthing tasty. She was especially fond of raspberries of which she never had in the South. She was completely giddy with excitement when the first berry was red enough to pick and eat. She loved to share her berries with my daughters when the were toddlers. They would arrive at her house and run to the back door, which was always kept locked, and wait with great anticipation until she arrived to unlock the door with explicit instructions of where to pick so as to not disturb tomorrow's picking.

Now I am left in the absence of these two great women, left to struggle on my own without their wisdom and instruction on how they did what they did with soil to create the small miracles of growth and production every Spring and Summer. Why is it that by the time I want to learn something from my elders they are gone? All I have is my memory of how their hands moved through the soil or how they would rise up and stretch when having leaned over for so long while weeding, and wiping their brow as they glanced at their progress. Memories that become more cherished the older I become.