Summer of the Squirrels

The summer of my father’s last garden was hot and wet, near perfect conditions for Minnesota’s short growing season. I was eight. I didn’t care about gardening, but I loved wading barefoot into the leafy rows to pull up the bright carrots, washing the mud off with the garden hose, and eating them, sweet and crisp, and unlike any other carrots I’d ever tasted. That last year, for the first time, he also planted corn.

My father had never grown a thing before we moved to Minnesota but something about being in a farming state moved him to plant. Every summer he dug up the latter half of our St. Paul yard and planted tomatoes and lettuce, carrots and cucumbers, string beans and zucchini. To fertilize his new obsession, he composted everything, even attaching a meat grinder to his work bench in the basement so he could pulverize our table scraps and freeze them in bags until the Minnesota winter relented and he could compost outside again. The smell of rotted meat wafting from that unwashed grinder terrorized our whole house, but we all acted like we didn’t smell a thing. Our long-standing family code was to pretend that nothing was wrong even when something was obviously wrong.