My two year old granddaughter has an earache and won’t take a nap. I call her over to sit on my lap and watch her favorite videos. I open one window on the computer for her, while I work in another window, typing with one hand since the other is holding her.
I start a playlist of children’s songs, and she sings along to the first one, The Garden Song.
….
Whenever I hear The Garden Song, I see myself back in grade school, sitting on my big sister’s bed, looking at her Mother Earth News magazines. She had a boyfriend she had met while working for the summer in Yellowstone. Yellowstone seemed like an almost impossibly far journey from my hometown in Illinois. It was full of mountains that took days to drive up, and hours to coast down, and big animals that I had only read about in Little House on the Prairie. This boyfriend was a ranch hand (I imagined him on a horse, with a big cowboy hat, riding a horse under the stars, rounding up cattle) and he wanted a wife to help him start a ranch off -grid, and live in a handmade cabin. My sister was seriously thinking about it, so that Autumn she immersed herself in Mother Earth News magazines and the Foxfire books.
I was 10 or so, and had decided it was time to graduate from Annoying Little Sister to Amusing Sidekick, and so spent many after school hours reading the magazines and books too, in the hopes of sounding like an intelligent advisor. I imagined how a compost pile cooked stew would taste, and what it would be like pooping in a toilet that didn’t flush. I tried to visualize how a cabin roof was built from the description in the first Foxfire book, and how to hang a hog for butchering. During that time, I heard the Garden song on the Muppet show, and somehow it became mixed into my fantasy of my sister’s future life. I imagined her coaxing vegetables and flowers from the ground while wearing a peasant blouse and apron. I had very little idea of gardening, except for the tomato plant my mother tried to grow each year in a container by the porch. It never produced much more than a sickly cherry tomato or two, so the Muppet version of a garden seemed as good a visual as any— Remember, I was only ten.
My sister eventually turned down the ranch hand’s offer, but I kept the imaginings of hand built cabins and the magic of vegetables bounding and vining out of the living ground. My teen years turned into something of a waking nightmare due to forces out of my control, and I distracted myself by mentally building log cabins, weaving hypothetical baskets from oak splits, and planting imaginary vegetables. Imagining I was somewhere, somewhen, and someone else got me through.
I think those were the years when I lost my religion, fundamentalist Christianity. It took until adulthood for me to notice it was gone, but I’d bet a dollar that it leaked away during that hard time. In its place grew a sacred garden. When there was no god to rescue me, I at least had the hope of a future, real, actual plot of dirt, and a harvest by and by. A real by and by, not one in the clouds. A by and by with actual tomatoes.
I didn’t realize that hope until another very difficult time in my life. My son had died, and I was looking for solace. Those seeds planted years ago in my sister’s bedroom sprouted, and I chose gardening as a comfort. And it did comfort me. It fed my soul, and when I needed it, it fed my family. The garden became a religious experience of sorts for me. Tending a garden is a type of worship.
-—
All this occurs to me as I hold my daughter’s daughter. Her sweet little voice sings the Garden Song, inch by inch, row by row. Her ear hurts, but she closes her eyes, and finds comfort in an imaginary garden that grows as if by magic. I turn to find a blanket to cover her, and see our kitchen table. It is in the living room now, covered with tiny newspaper pots; each pot has soil and two or three seeds, and they sit by a warm, sunny window. They haven’t sprouted yet, but I trust in the magic. In a few days, they will shoot up tiny green stems and first little leaves to test the new world outside the seed. They will grow inch by inch, and later, I’ll set them outside, in the sun and rain. Row by row, warmed by the sun above and soil below until the rains come tumbling down. Surely this is magic. Surely this is a sacred thing.
Edited to add the lyrics:
Inch by inch, row by row, I'm gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below 'til the rain comes tumbling down
Pullin' weeds and pickin' stones, we are made of dreams and bones
I feel the need to grow my own 'cause the time is close at hand
Grain for grain, sun and rain, I'll find my way in nature's chain
I tune my body and my brain to the music of the land
Inch by inch, row by row, I'm gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below 'til the rain comes tumbling down
So plant your rows straight and long, temper them with prayer and song
Mother earth can keep you strong if you give her love and care
Now an old crow watching hungrily from his perch in yonder tree
In my garden I'm as free as that feathered thief up there
Inch by inch, row by row, I'm gonna make this garden grow
All it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground
Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below 'til the rain comes tumbling
Inch by inch, row by row, someone bless these seeds I sow
Someone warm them from below 'til the rain comes tumbling down
-David Mallett