His garden is gone, the old rows grown over by crabgrass clumps. Only a memory-tuned eye perceives the outline where Harley’s prize pumpkins, stalks of corn raided by raccoons, beans, carrots, potatoes, and beets were nurtured. The whole neighborhood wheeled carts of grass clippings out back for compost piles that fed roots of plants, or to make mulch that kept weeds down and helped soil stay moist in the summer sun. He’d give you a tour, talk with his pronounced Norwegian accent, you needed to listen well to words, and his excitement over I-V drips that fed the young vines of baby monsters, pumpkins so large you couldn’t move them on your own. Plastic tents protected blooms and tender foliage. He’d start in spring to get them grown by September’s Spokane Interstate Fair, blue ribbons every year. By October he was done and willing to share the most massive Jack-O-Lanterns for our front porch, where his grand kids came to say, “Trick or Treat!” and we’d give them candy and laugh as the light glowed within. It’s been decades since my family moved and Harley died, his wife grew old alone and now the house sits empty, or maybe new people don’t go outside much. The garden hill of good soil lay fallow and will be most likely sold off. Development of new homes divide up the large lots of the neighborhood where I used to mow lawns of the Evans, and Betty, and Chuck, and our house, and this skinny boy in tall white tube socks with red stripes brought countless carts of grass to Harley’s garden. He’d point to where he wanted the piles that helped build soil, and he’d shout “Thanks!” as I’d leave and he’d go back to work to tend growth.
