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Then Mrs. McKinley and I sit on the ratty couch in the living room and talk. I tell her about my dreams of the spring and the garden, and all the produce we’ll have. We’re saving up the money to pay the rent on the land and the extra gas to go back and forth there every day in the summer. We’re going to make this happen.
“We’ll grow our own food and be self-sufficient!” I say. “Enough to eat all summer, and preserve for the winter.” I promise to share our harvest with her. “We’ll bring you fresh tomatoes and potatoes, and pumpkins when they’re ready.”
She smiles, genuinely pleased. “I’m so happy for you,” she says.
“Thank you,” I say, smiling. So am I.
That night, after I read Morgen a story and tuck her into bed, I open my journal. The blank page stares up at me. I take a deep breath and slowly, carefully write, “Waiting for Spring.”
Attempts
Scott is busy getting ready. He found a place to rent a rototiller, he ordered seeds, and he's looking for fencing to protect the garden we’re going to plant. He brings Morgen to the library while I’m at work and researches products online. After weeks of looking, he narrows in on seven-foot plastic link fencing that he can attach to wooden posts and surround the garden. It’s over three hundred dollars for what we need, but there's no cheaper way to keep the deer out.
The last week of March, he starts germinating seeds. Morgen helps him fill the containers with soil, and together they push the seeds down and cover them up.
“Now we need to keep them warm and moist,” Scott says, arranging the trays on shelves in front of the windows.
When tiny shoots sprout up, Morgen gasps in delight. She checks on them every day, and when I get home from work she shows me the progress the little plants have made.
In early May, the ground is ready. Scott calls for the rototiller and plans to prepare the soil for planting. But when he picks me up from work the next day, he tells me the guys at the rental shop told him the rototiller won’t break through sod. We’ll have to have the ground ploughed first.
“How?”
“A local guy named Joe apparently has a plough. I gave him a call and he said he'd help us out. Said he's glad people want to grow food locally, and he wants to help us get started.”
“How much is he going to charge?”
“I don’t know. He said not to worry about it.”
“That's nice of him,” I say, touched that someone’s willing to help us out.
As it turns out, though, it's not nice at all. The guy spends Thursday afternoon ploughing and then drops off a bill for six hundred dollars.
“Are you serious?” I demand.
Scott’s furious. “If we’d known he was going to charge that much, we never would have done it. It’ll take us a year to pay off.”
But there’s nothing we can do about it. The work’s already been done. So we start making payments, digging into our garden fund. Now we don't have enough money left to buy the fencing. We'll have to take our chances with the deer.
“You don't know deer,” Scott says.
“We don't have a choice. We'll buy the fencing when we can afford it.”
When the first of June arrives, the threat of frost is finally pretty much gone. Scott takes Morgen out while I’m at work, and we all go together on the weekend. Morgen helps us dig the holes, and we remove each delicate plant from the tray, careful not to damage the roots. We place each one tenderly in the ground, pat it down, and move on to the next hole.
Next, we plant the beans and carrots, covering the seeds with soil and marking the rows. After a while, Morgen runs off to play on the garden’s perimeter at the forest’s edge. She picks wildflowers and collects fallen cedar boughs for a make-believe pie, an offering to the forest animals.
We finish planting at dusk. We're tired and hungry, but before we leave we take a long look around at all we’ve accomplished.
“All this work will be worth it,” I tell Morgen. “We’ll have food to eat and store away for the winter thanks to our hard work today.”
The hard work continues. Scott brings Morgen back after dropping me off at work the next day, and the next. It becomes a routine: the two of them tend the garden while I work nine-hour days at the radio station, raising money to fill the station’s ever-increasing needs. When I get home, I make dinner and clean up the small cabin that has dishes piled in the sink and dirt all over the floors from Scott and Morgen’s boots and gloves. At night I listen to Morgen’s stories of the bean plants’ progress and the tiny flowers on the tomato plants.
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