My Papa French was an avid gardener. He was all legs, and I can still see him out in his garden with his red tiller. When we lived with him and my sweet Nanny for a bit during my childhood, I got to have a little patch of garden beneath the kitchen window. One of my greatest triumphs (when I wasn't glued to reruns of "Laverne and Shirley" or practicing any manner of tomfoolery around the house while Nanny and Papa napped) was growing a little crop of radishes.
As the years passed, I found that my ability to grow things was eclipsed regularly by my tendency to kill them. I have kept some roses alive (only the rogue brand, I'm told by people who grow real roses) and I have been quite adept with climbing yellow Black-eyed Susans, which I see as a wink from God that says, "Nance, thanks for trying. Since you struggle with living things but love yellow, I'm going to give you this bit of beauty. It's good for the both of us."
It wasn't until I birthed two little humans and managed to not only keep them alive but seem to be relatively good at it (a sizable percentage of the time...let's not get crazy), that I thought there might be hope for me with soil and seed.
This spring, in my new-found "leisure time" as a stay-at-home mama (don't get me started on people who say, "so how do you spend your time? What do you do?"), I decided to give produce a shot. As I took the family VISA for a spin at the local greenhouse that has fed my thriving Black-Eyed Susan habit for years, I happened upon the radish seeds. In a Lifetime Original Movie flashback sequence, I was transported to my little plot of land in 1980. Much had gone wrong in my world back then, but my radishes had done me right. It was a no-brainer.
In the realm of farming karma, the radishes pulled through again today. As I inspected my little crops this morning, through the soil peered bright red success. Giddy with this sign from God that I am, in fact, meant to live off the land, I paraded the lone radish in for my offspring to see. I texted a pic of my harvest to my pal in Santa Rosa (she actually knows what she is doing and is remarkably good at it). She advised, "don't stuff yourself."
While I may not be a bumper crop away from singing to Mother Earth and fashioning myself a skirt out of wheat, this is a hash mark on the tote board in favor of domesticated Nance. Baby steps, folks.
I have a feeling my Papa is in a pleather recliner up in his heaven surveying a beautiful garden. But this morning he probably felt a little pull and looked left, over the arm of his chair and the puff of his pipe. There he saw his little brown-eyed granddaughter, all grown up. She was showing her babies who never got to meet him that there is a little Raymond French in her after all. Just in case he was looking down, for a brief moment, I looked up.
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