Please enjoy this Classic Hank episode of the Hank Griffin Podcast.
I like to garden. Always have. Inherited the trait and learned the basics from, Momma.
Momma has always been a forward thinking, able, and diligent gardener. For all I know, she had to be, after all, old gun fighters sometimes need a place to bury the fools who occasionally show up to challenge the legend.
Just kidding, Momma – on the off chance you are listening, just a little jokey-joke.
For the rest of y’all, its not really a joke. When you see Momma at the Piggly Wiggly, you really should treat her courteously.
When my father died, we had a good supply a preserved meat that he and I hunted, our family, fished, a hog done in a sugar cure, and jars and jars and jars of Momma’s good home canned garden produce that she’d labored to put away in case of hard times.
Hard times… ugh.
Little do we know, especially in our youth just how sudden and painful hard times really are.
Death is no respecter of persons. If it were, the world might be far more orderly, predictable, and make sense. Perhaps babies would come into the world, live their lives contributing to society, the happiness of their families and other loved ones, then, at a ripe old age, pass from this world to the next.
It is a sweet thought, but naive.
There are lots of folks who live good, or awful, long lives. Some do great good in the world. Others do little else but wickedness. Most of us are likely somewhere in between. Then, when age settles as winter upon them, they go. For some, its sudden. For others, death lingers about them for decades before it finally provides relief for their suffering.
For too many, it comes as a thief in the night, sudden, terrible. No thought given to preparation. In its wake, wailing, pain, misery, hunger, cold, fear, abuse, maybe years of it, or a lifetime.
There is a subset of the population that we refer to as, “preppers.” They are viewed with suspicion, concern, derision, condescension, and little of anything like respect. This despite the fact that many of them are actively engaged in activities that help ensure their family’s resiliency in the face of sudden difficulty.
I think part of this is probably because of the buffoonery we see on YouTube and other digital platforms. Some of these people talk a lot about zombies, the end of the world, and other catastrophes that are devastating to a degree that can only be societially fatal if not world ending. Some appear to seek attention that is self affirming or are trying to see items that will make sure that, “you too will find yourself safe, sound, and at the top of the food chain when all the, ‘sheep’ are nothing more than food for the wolves.”
How silly.
Meanwhile, there are also thoughtful men and women in the world who save a little money, set aside something extra in their pantry, and try to ensure that they have a few paper books to refer to in case something unexpected happens.
My grandparents were like that. Uncle Carl was too in his way. They were the children of the Great Depression. They were the soliders and wives of the Second World War. They knew, from first hand experience the hell of want, real hunger, and war. None of them wished to experience those things a second time. Those old men and women worked hard – not to merely buy toys but to ensure that they had a bulwork, a hedge against any storm be it sudden or well forecast. They did not want to go hungry again. They had no desire to fight the Nazis and the Japanese again.
Those good men and women did not want to see their children or grandchildren suffer for lack of forethought, care, and planning. They did what they could to inculcate in their posterity all that was needed to thrive in times of plenty and persevere in the face of hardship.
Now, they are gone and there are none left who share a collective memory of terrible hardship, world war, and starvation.
Momma and Dub listened to their old folks. They worked hard to ensure that we had a secure home, something set aside to eat if things went south of a sudden, and thank God they did. When my father died, there was little else but hard times.
There was no credit life insurance on our farm. We lost it and moved into town.
Momma, a stay at home wife and mother, with an eighth grade educaton, had no marketable skills. She took job waiting tables at Chris’s Cafe during the day. At night, she attended school to become and emergency medical technician or EMT. When she graduated from EMT school she took a job, out of town, as an EMT during the day and continued to attend school at night to become a Paramedic.
Eventually, she graduated, went to work in our little Beautiful as a Paramedic and was even made Shift Sergeant. For all her hard work, she was paid 18,000 dollars a year. That is how she fed us.
I have always been incredibly proud of her for that.
Eventually, we ate through the venison, pork, fish, peas, corn, tomatoes, and Momma’s good jelly of wild blackberry and wild plums.
Thankfully, through all of it, she continued to garden and can what we couldn’t eat.
In those days there was no talk of zombies or other silliness. Rather, we were living through the loss of father, provider, and protector, and Momma simply did what she and Dub did before – made sure that our family worked to set aside a surplus that would continue to see us through whatever might come.
Were my parents, “preppers?”
Heavens no!
They were practical people who paid attention to the world around them and never wanted to either go hungry or see their children starve.
Dub was a coal miner. From time to time there was talk of strikes. I remember a particular time when the talk was serious. Dub was worried enough that he sat me down to discuss it, man to man.
It was clear that my father wanted to work. “Can’t you just vote no and keep working?” I asked.
Dub, not wishing to make me afraid but also desiring to convey the honesty that should be respected between a father and son said, “No son. If the union votes to strike, I will strike. If I did anything else, our family would be made to suffer. Let’s pray the mine remains open and union doesn’t strike.”
My folks weren’t concerned with foolishness. No. They, like their old people before them, were worried about things that were real. We never worried about, zombies. We were afraid my father might lose his livelihood.
When I was five, Momma and I presented Uncle Carl with a young pear tree. Before long a second pear tree was planted alongside it. Over the next twenty years, I benefited by watching that pear tree grow and seeing it produce a rich abundance of delicious buttery pears year after year. It didn’t happen all at once of course. It took three or four years for the tree to mature to a point that it could produce any fruit. Eventually though, the pears came and in such wonderful abundance!
Uncle Carl and us boys ate all the pears we could stand and every old woman that Uncle knew came to pick pears from which they made preserves. The smart ones shared a few jars with Uncle Carl and continued to benefit by being able to come pick. Those who did not… well, they usually faded from the story pretty quick.
In addition to two large pear trees, Uncle Carl had a good producing fig, a gigantic series of wild black berry bushes, an ancient mulberry tree, dewberries, hack berries, and passion fruit that grew wild in the corral. He also tended a modest garden until he just couldn’t anymore.
In that wonderful old gentleman’s yard were two huge native pecan trees. They provided shade for the house, shade for sitting, a home for squirrels, and a rich harvest of pecans year after year.
After my father died, things were difficult between my mother and I. This trauma affected each of us deeply.
I was not an easy child to raise. She was not an easy woman to be raised by. There were only seventeen years separating us. There is no fault finding here. I was a child being raised by a child – one who’d just lost the only man who really and truly ever loved her - as a man ought to love a woman.
Those were desperately hard times.
Despite this, we were blessed for Momma loved to garden. Our home there in Beautiful sat on good sandy soil. It was the kind of earth that would grow anything worth growing! On the south side of the house we had a large garden plot and just as was true with Momma, it called to me.
I loved to work my hands in that good earth.
It was not only “good” earth, it was something akin to “sacred” earth. When Momma and I stood on that garden plot, within the confines of the barbed wire fence that surrounded it on every side, and worked there together, there were no unkind words. There were no ugly looks.
Momma taught. She was patient.
I listened, worked, and learned.
That garden plot was blessed ground; a place of miracles.
With hard work, prayers for rain, more hard work, patience, and the blessings of Heaven, our garden grew. We planted seeds, hoed weeds, killed pests, worried over the infreqency of rain, hoped, and prayed. Seeds sprounted. Sprouts became plants. Plants grew, flowered, fruited, and went to seed.
Our family’s garden was not some exercise in meditation. We were not trying to connect with the earth. This was not some hippy experience for us.
We were poor. My father was dead. Momma worked very hard but there were many mouths to feed.
The success or failure of our garden mattered. It determined much of the quaility of our diet for most of the next year.
On a particular evening, I sat on the floor in the front room as I often did working on my school work. Momma sat up on the couch. As I remember it, we were alone. Movement on the periphery of my vision drew my attention. Turning to look I was surprised to see someone in our garden apparantly helping herself to our vegetables.
My much younger self lept from the floor, yelped the alarm, turned to lead the charge outside, only to be stopped by Momma.
“What in the world is wrong with you boy?”
“There is a woman in the garden stealing our vegetables!”
“What?!?”
Momma turned to look out the window. I saw her eyes narrow. Knowing my mother’s temper, a sense of glee made itself known to me as I considered the fate of the thief in the garden.
“Let’s go get her,” I said.
Momma turned to face me. Her already narrow eyes took me in and narrowed further.
“What do you mean, ‘Let’s go get her?’”
“She is stealing from us!”
Again Momma turned apparantly considering then turned back to face me.
“Stay here.”
Momma walked to the dining room, found her stash of paper grocery bags that she liked to keep from our shopping trips to the Piggly Wiggly, brought four large ones back with her and pressed them into my arms.
“Take these out to the garden, fill them up with the prettiest vegetables you can find out there. Fill up every single bag – to the top. Load them into the back of that woman’s car then come back inside.
“Momma, she is robbing us!”
“Shut your mouth and do what I said.”
My heart raced. Blood and rage rushed to my face. My pulse pounded. Tears of acute frustration threatened to spill from my eyes.
I thought to say more but looked into the eyes of my mother who, though she only stood 5’2” and weighed no nore than 110 lbs, was known to shoot first and ask questions later – literally. She was the kind of woman who might burn your house down while you slept inside. Had made clear to more than one of our school teachers who called her to announce that one of us was about to receive a paddling that, “certainly you can whip him if you think thats best, but I know where you live and if you do whip him, when you get home, I’ll be there waiting and am going to whip you.”
She was not much physically but Momma was very like a storm in her way. Sometimes she brought rain. Other times thunder. From time to time a terrible East Wind - biblical.
Looking in her eyes, it was that terrible East Wind I saw looking back at me and I had no intention of reaping it.
I turned with the brown paper bags, stepping towards the front door.
“Son,” my mother said. I turned to hear what she had to say. Her features had not softened, if anything that awful wind seemed to gather about her as she said, “If you say a single ugly word to that woman, if you so much as look sideways at her, you will regret it.”
In the part of the world where I live now, good manners are less important that they were when I was a boy. Many seem to look on them as, ‘qauint.’ In my childhood and in that of many of my contemporaries, good manners were a matter of childhood survival.
“Yes ma’am,” I said then stepped outside.
The woman, a dark skinned black woman who appeared to be in her mid-forties did not see me at first. She was bent over an okra plant cutting ripe okra. Her car was parked on the side of the road on the other end of the garden. When she did see me, I was already in the garden. I thought she would run, she seemed about to bolt, then saw the paper bags I carried.
Cold rage coursed through me. I said nothing, I could not trust myself to do so without precipitating the fury of the storm that waited in the house. I did not so much as look at the woman who wantonly robbed our family’s only means of feeding ourselves.
Green cucumbers, yellow crook neck squash, okra, purple hull peas, corn, tomatoes, onions, zucchini, cantaloupe, cream peas, jalapeno and cayenne peppers, and much more went into the bags until they were filled – to the very top.
For a while the woman just watched me. As I worked and said nothing to her, she returned to her labor of helping herself to our garden. She wore a large apron that she held open in front of her like a sack, filling it with vegetables.
When my work was done I turned to her working hard to control my facial expression, preparing to speak, hoping I could do so in a way that not doom me to the Terrible East Wind.
“Ma’am, if you will open your car I will put these bags in your back seat or trunk.”
There was fear in her eyes though at my words the fear softened. She lead me to a well worn, old blue hatchback. Something like a chevette or B210. Paint faded and worn. In any other state it would have been ravaged with rust but not in, Texas.
She opened the hatch and I sat the paper bags full of our family’s hard work and future meals into her car then turned and started toward the house. As I began to step away the woman, who had not yet spoken a word, laid a gentle, tentative hand on my forearm then quickly pulled it away. I turned back to her working hard to control the anger that fought to consume me.
“I have not eaten in two days. My children have not eaten anything today. Tonight, we will eat these vegetables. May God bless you.”
With this the woman gave me a tearfilled smile, closed the hatch, sat in her worn out old car, worked to get it started – the car did not want to start. Gave up a moment, assumed an attitude of prayer, tried again and, after a loud backfire, and an excess of awful smoke, was able to drive away.
I watched, there on the side of the road next to our garden as she did so. The anger that threatned to overtake me faded. In its place I felt shame. The color of rage melted from my face only to be replaced by shades of humilation.
Returning to the house I walked up the concrete steps, entered the door, and saw that there too the East Wind had subsided. In its place was a much gentler Momma. She hugged me and said, “Son, charity is the perfect love of Christ.”
It is a lesson that I have never forgotten.
Much Love,
Hank
You’ve Been Hanked.
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