In the days when my grandmother was still a young girl of an unripe age, there was a wind that swept the prairies with the force of a God not to be reckoned with. It was a wind that broke boughs from branches and scattered crops for the crows; one that left in its wake a tidal wave of soil, stones, and disparity. They called it the “Dirty Thirties”. Dirty – as if the sin of the earth was a shameful burden that poor farmers had to bear. Dirty, unlike the God my grandmother preached would save me from all earthly harm.

I can hear my grandmother’s sermons about God and gardening to this day. It’s been thirty years since her passing. I swear I can still hear her exclaim how sweet the carrots are from across the dinner table, her voice soft and warm.

My grandmother was a gardener of vegetables and teenage girls. She religiously planted vegetables every year on the farm. She also planted the seed in me to achieve a green
thumb, though I cannot say I've accomplished this goal. My corner of the garden withers under the August sun.

I suppose my grandmother was successful because of her creativity in times of adversity. She’d tell me stories of growing up and of the in-between season when the preserves of
last year’s harvest were gone. She’d have to wait until autumn to eat again, in those hungry days. Yet, once times were good again and “dirty” was no longer a daily endurance, she'd
sing.

My grandmother sang hymns while she gardened, a
technique I was reluctant to try, no matter how much my grandmother preached God’s wonders. My grandmother put black coffee into the soil and she believed that gardening without gloves improved the soil as well as the skin. Her husband believed her to be crazy, as did all the other growers in her rural community. Yet she triumphed and I ate her from her garden at the end of every harvest season under bowed heads and prayer. 

It’s those prayers and hymns that I still hear while I garden. Though, to this day I cannot grow a single vegetable. The gardens of the other women in the neighbourhood swell thick. Leaves poke through small greenhouse windows. Turnips grow, in spite of the dry spell. Tomatoes are juicy thanks to Miracle Grow.

I peek over fences and think, this is the secret: a greenhouse. I
beg my husband to build me one, but still, my plants die. It seems to be only me that cannot keep a single thing alive.
If my grandmother could see me now, she would be disappointed. “A greenhouse?” she’d cry, “When God made the earth in seven days, He didn’t build it in a
greenhouse!” I wonder about my grandmother’s creativity and how she broke the constraints of conventional farming. What would she prescribe to remedy my broken soul, my horrible green thumb?

As a young girl, I’d lament to my journal the deaths that had long been coming – the parched lettuce, the shriveled pale carrots, the sad unbecoming of the zucchinis. What is it I can grow?

Much to my surprise, I find myself asking God the same question. He gives me my grandmother in a packet of sunflower seeds. Sunflowers, I remember my grandmother raising. She called them a “hardy flower”. She grew them as a reminder be grateful for our triumphs over troubled times, and to be gracious to those who don’t understand. Sunflowers, I know, need little watering, an immense amount of sun, and a post to hold them once they get too tall. 

My husband now calls me crazy because I refuse to garden in the greenhouse he has built. He says we would starve if it wasn’t for the grocery store. He doesn’t understand my deep gardening history and the reasons I must break the conventionality of the greenhouse. I’ll grow my sunflowers in the ground, sing to them sweet songs of prayer, pour rich, black coffee over their roots, kiss their seeds with my ungloved hands.

I pursue a new goal: not to produce a bounty worthy of
a hungry family’s praise, but one to fill my soul with the growing life and when the sunflowers shoot up out of the earth, I shall feel my grandmother here beside me.