Digging into History

I was outside working in the large vegetable garden yesterday. I never completely clear it in the fall because birds and squirrels will eat the seeds I have left behind over the long winter, but there comes a day every spring when I can't stand the mess out there one more minute, and I go forth to conquer the chaos.

As I pulled up the hundred feet or so of giant zinnias and marigolds which formed  a double border around last year's garden, I was impressed with how soft the soil was. I found the same soft soil in the potato patch, the squash patch, and the tomato patch. Usually I have the garden rototilled by a neighbor, but it occurred to me yesterday as I was clearing the land, that I could work the soil myself with a hoe if I did it now while the earth was so soft from its winter rest.

Once cleared, the garden just begged to be turned over, and even though my muscles were begging for a rest, I told myself I would do just a bit. Just for the fun of it. Just because the sun was shining, and it was a perfect day to linger outdoors. Of course, I have lied to myself like that for years, and this time was no different. I continued plugging along until the entire garden was worked and rows and hills were formed and marked for future planting.

People who live in new sub divisions don't experience the archaeological aspects of gardening that our family always has known. The family home on Campbell Street was built in the mid 1800's. In fact, it was the very first house on Campbell Street, a very busy and now well-established thoroughfare in our fair city. Trains pass under the bridge three blocks up the street giving cheery whistles at all hours of the day. School buses roar back and forth carrying students to both the middle school on our corner and the high school one mile north of us. And Campbell Street has always been a hospital route so we have screaming ambulances not to mention fire trucks and police cars zooming past our house at all hours of the day and night.

Because our house has stood here for well over one hundred years, digging down into the soil of any part of the yard is much like an an archaeological dig in the truest form. When we were kids, we found all sorts of things while digging in the yard including old reading glasses, bent forks and spoons, wooden spools for sewing thread, tin cans, string and rope, pennies, nickels and dimes, broken toys including trucks and cars with no wheels and dolls with no heads, all circa 1920-1940. Now and then we'd find the metal part of a tool or farm implement or old square nails. Once we found a cabbage cutter, the kind used for making saurkraut.

In the seven years that Gary and I  have lived here, we've found marbles, Cracker Jack toys, buttons, pieces of porcelain and pottery and unusual colored glass, a watch face, a piece of a cheap necklace, and the blade for an old garden scythe. We've also dug up an amazing quantity of walnuts, acorns, peanuts, and feed corn, the latter two of which we bought and put out for the squirrels who must have thought better of eating it and so they buried it just so I could dig it up again in the spring. Our yard has always produced an abundance of walnuts owing to the fact that we have four walnut trees in the yard. Then there are the twelve or so walnut trees on the same block. This is walnut heaven for squirrels, and after they've stuffed themselves on a warm autumn day, they have nothing else to do but bury the darned things all over the yard.

When I was a kid autumn was a glorious time. School had just started up for another year, leaves were turning colors, that brisk chill was in the air that made one shiver with delight for no reason at all, and then, once all those colorful leaves hit the ground, it was time to rake them.

Raking leaves today is nothing like it was in the 1940's and 50's. Today we rake the leaves into paper bags that first we have to buy so that the city street dept, whose salaries we also pay through our taxes, can pick them up. Sometimes we  pay someone else to do the raking, but even when we do rake the leaves ourselves, we consider it more of a chore than a recreation. And no one considers burning their piles of leaves for fear of getting a ticket from one governmental department or other. 

Today burning leaves is verboten in most every state except perhaps Alaska, but when I was a kid, pyromania was only a crime if you burned someone's house or barn. Everyone dreamed of the massive bonfires of autumn and the surrounding activities that were traditions for each family.

In our house, any tradition was accompanied by general hysteria. Our family couldn't do anything without running in circles and shouting at each other. I think this came from the fact that neither of my parents had much patience and the added fact that my sisters and I were aborigines. 

I noticed that our neighbors were peaceful leaf rakers. They moved slowly,smiled at each other and spoke civilly in the course of the task. Parents and children together raking leaves down to the curb. Happily.


Not us. The street was our enemy. Every summer our parents made an Olympic sport of chasing us and yelling at us if we went anywhere near the street. Maybe they'd been told by a fortune teller that one of their children would be mashed beneath the wheels of a '49 Chevy or that one of the kids would hitchhike their way to freedom when her mom and dad weren't looking. Whatever generated their fear, all we had to do was step off the sidewalk and a head would appear out of nowhere screaming, "Stay out of that street!" 

So until we were older, we were given backyard raking assignments, which in general stank because raking the huge piles of leaves into the street and setting them on fire seemed the best job because of its proximity to the dangerous street we were always warned about.  But there were perks to chasing each other around the backyard and putting hands full of leaves down each others' shirts as well as jumping into the large piles of leaves waiting to be burned in the garden. And the garden fire was by far better than the fires at the curb anyway. 

At the curb you could have a burning leaf pile only so far out into the street before you obstructed traffic, but in the garden, you could pile those leaves into a pyre twenty feet wide and six feet tall. My dad took an engineering point of view to his bonfires. He had rules. First, all leaves were to be first compacted in a wooden basket. This was done by an older child stuffing leaves into the basket and a younger child stomping on the leaves much like grape stompers at a winery. Second, he was the only one to place the basket contents in the garden so he could create a symmetrical mountain of leaves. And third, walnuts and acorns were to be separated out before the leaf compacting began. 

As small children we didn't understand his reasoning. Green walnuts are moist nuts within a green rind that covers the familiar brown shell that most of us associate with walnuts. When they are roasted to high temperatures, the moisture on the inside expands and eventually explodes much like popcorn, but much larger. 

Once my younger sisters and I realized this fact, autumn raking had a possible edge to exploit. We raked. As usual. We stomped down basket after basket for the bonfire. As usual. We separated the walnuts and acorns. As usual. We stashed a bag of walnuts behind a bush. Not usual.

Our plan was simple. If one walnut would explode and go "boom" how much more would a bag full? We waited until Dad went in for some reason, and then hurried out to the garden with our paper grocery sack half of walnuts and acorns. We shoved  as many as we could deep into the pile of leaves, being careful that none could be seen. And then back to raking, basketting, and stomping. 

Around dusk, the moment we all had waited for arrived. For dad, it was seeing another engineering masterpiece ignite and light up the whole back yard. For my fellow saboteurs, it was the delicious expectation of something unknown but decidedly bad since we had been told in a way not to do something we had done in a big way.

Dad tossed on a little lighter fluid to give things an oomph and the fire blazed. We kids danced around the edge of the garden feeling the heat farther and farther out into the yard as it grew hotter and hotter. You could feel your eyes drying as you gazed at the flickering yellow and orange flames licking higher and higher. Little bits off ash flew off into the wind like so many little ghosts. It was a wondrous night. We kids were so caught up in the dancing and yelling and chasing each other around the edge of the garden that even we were taken by surprise when the first walnut went off.

Out of no where we all saw an orb of bright light fly out of the flaming bonfire and explode with a loud bang. Before anyone could accuse or comment, a second one went off. My dad started to ask something but a third, fourth, fifth, and sixth went off almost simultaneously causing everyone to run for cover. And then for the next ten minutes or so, we had our own fireworks exhibit as walnut after walnut exploded into pieces as they emerged from the flaming pyre. The acorns, much smaller but still mini grenades, offered a kind of texture to the exhibit, a contrapuntal line to the percussive melody of the night.


I remember getting spanked, no small thing when my dad was the one spanking. But, you know, I don't remember the pain. I do, however, remember in detail how much fun we had salting my dad's carefully piled bonfire with nuts and our delight at the result we had all been told would be terrible, but which, in fact, was a hoot.