The following blog is an essay originally written by a college colleague of mine back in 2011 for their English 101 class. The professor thought it was good enough to be entered for a shot of being published in my college's literary reader that comes out once a year, and the school published it. So I did not write this. And it is being used with permission and all rights reserved to the school and to my colleague. Originally published in my college's literary reader in 2012. I am going to make it into two blogs this is part one.
"The Summers Spent with my Grandmother"
When the dew was still on the ground and there was a light fog in the air, you could hear roosters crowing as my grandmother would get up as she had every morning and get her day started. She was always an early riser. "The early bird gets the worm,' she'd always say, so she'd come in and wake up her sleepy grandchildren that had stayed the night before. We would eat a very good breakfast, grits, eggs, bacon, and milk. We had to have it because she was about to work us. Now it was time to get the day started. She loved being outside.
We would go to the area where just days before we had tilled the ground for a garden. She would have one of us walk first to put the hole in the ground for the seed, then one drop the seed, and she would go last to cover it up. We would plant squash, cucumber, okra, peas, corn, tomatoes, and potatoes. It would take about half a day; that's why we got started early. As we would be planting the garden, we would sing. She would tell us stories of how things were when she was a child. How families worked together, and how they grew their own veggies and for the most part their own meat. I would tell her how I wished I had grown up in those times. She said it was very hard, but at least they were together. We watered the garden everyday and watched it grow. She would say it was like watching her children and grandchildren grow. You had to love, care for, and nourish the garden the way you do a family because without what it needs, it would not grow properly.
Weeks went by, and as we watched the garden grow, I was becoming very impatient. I would sneak out there and pull a potato from the ground and eat it.Then came the time I had waited all those weeks for, harvest time. It was a precious time for me because I was with my Grandmother. We would go to the garden and pick veggies that were ready. My Grandmother and I would sit on her front porch, shuck the ears of corn, and hull the peas. Later we would wash them vigorously to make sure there was not any dirt in the peas or silk in the corn. Sometimes we would put away some of the peas for the winter. There's nothing like a cold winter day and hot peas that you grew and hulled yourself. We would also cut some of the corn from the cob and make our own creamed corn.
End of Part One.
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