How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [32]
“Knock wood, this is going to be a great year for corn,” Poppy said one morning not long after I arrived. The little plants were nearly a foot high, and Poppy carefully tugged bindweed from between them.
I knelt beside the squashes, pinching out a dark-leaved succulent that seemed to have roots all the way to the molten center of the earth. “How do you know?”
“Experience, I guess. Hot days, cool nights—that’s what corn likes. And peaches, too.” She pointed with a spade to a tree draped with netting. “I’ll make peach butter this year, and you can take some home to eat all winter.”
I grunted. Winter seemed like another world, a lifetime I’d never see. Finishing with the squash, I stood up. “Do you want me to weed between the tomatoes?”
“In a minute. First I want to show you how to tie them up.”
She came down the row to me. After the first day, she always wore a bra, though I’m not sure how she knew it bugged me when she didn’t. Right now her hair and clothes seemed to make sense—jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back in a braid to keep it out of her way. Over everything, she wore a colorful bibbed apron with a bunch of pockets, and out of one she took a bundle of long twist ties. She handed them to me and pulled off her gloves.
“Tomatoes like three things,” she said, picking up a branch covered with flowers that was trailing toward the earth. “Sunshine, plenty of water, and lots of support.” There was a metal-gridwork thing around each plant. Poppy used twist ties to attach the branches to the cage. “You try,” she said, pointing to the next one. Like it was some super-hard thing to do.
I followed her example, gently tugging a branch over the top of one square of the cage to let the bar support it, then loosely twisting a tie around it to hold it in place.
“Good.”
“It’s not rocket science.”
She grinned. “True. But it matters to do it right.” She took the new branch in her hand. “The next thing we do with tomatoes is pinch off some of the blossoms, to get better size on the tomatoes that do grow. Just let one on each cluster stay.”
Now, this appealed to me. I walked along the row, looking for flower clusters, and I thought of my grandmother Adelaide, Poppy’s mother. “Did Grandma teach you to garden?”
Poppy didn’t answer for a minute. “Grandma grows flowers,” she said, in a tone of voice that said it was something shameful. “I like to grow things that matter.”
“Flowers matter.” I thought of my grandmother’s irises, which had been blooming a couple of weeks before. Big ruffled flowers on tall stems in colors that reminded me of old-fashioned long dresses—salmon and purple and velvety brown and pale pink. “Her garden makes me think of a ball, with all the princesses dancing.”
Poppy stood and raised her eyebrows. “Great imagery, kid.”
“Thanks.” I moved to the next plant in the group. Two small green knobs of tomato were growing side by side. “What do you do when there are already tomatoes instead of flowers?”
“Pinch one off.”
I gave her an exaggerated frown. “But they’re so cute!”
“Neither will get enough of what it needs if you leave them both.”
With a pang, I chopped one away, let it fall on the ground. “Why don’t you talk to Grandma?”
The war had been going on as long as I could remember. Poppy came to our house, and we came here, but Adelaide never showed up at Poppy’s, and Poppy never came to celebrations at my grandmother’s house. On Christmas Eve, she came to our house to exchange presents and eat fondue, but Christmas Day was always at my grandmother’s big Victorian on the Westside of Colorado Springs, and Poppy never came there. Not once in all my life could I remember them being in the same room.
Poppy brushed her palms together. “Sometimes even when someone is your family,