for my mother

Saturday the sun was shining when everyone and their mother expected grey and rain so I went with my own mother to the farm down the road to find plants for our garden. On the way there we followed a pickup and when it braked suddenly, my mother's arm shot out in front of me; her mere (freckled) flesh and bone standing guard between me and windshield and beyond that--the wide, cruel world.

She does this often, and I laugh: her futile attempts at thwarting the laws of physics. My oldness, my supposed grown up status. The love behind this gesture, the way that it has not changed through all the years, all the sudden stops and starts on new roads in strange towns.

At the farm I trail her up and down through the rows of plants. As with everything else in her life, she had a precise vision of the way it should look and a plan for how to get it just right. She holds up plants, examines their leaves, makes measurements with her mind's eye and coordinates colors and heights. Two old men, in worn, sagging wranglers and feed company T-shirts follow us around and smoke unfiltered Marlboros. She chats easily with them and they take the plants she selects from her hands and set them in flats off to the side.

All day my mother and I dig and plant. We rip up earth that has not been moved for years, pulling out roots as thick as our fingers and the worms that sleep in the cool damp dirt. If this blooms the way I envision it, it will be so pretty she says over and over. The feeling of dirt under my fingernails drives me crazy and blisters begin to rise in protest across my palms. I'd rather be reading a book. I am working side by side with my mother, though, in the clear, warm light and she is happy; this is something after these past months of sadness and turmoil. So I strip down to my underwear to work on my tan and concentrate on how I am finally putting all my reading of Wendell Berry to good, practical, dirty-hands use.

Late in the afternoon, thick grey clouds bunch up over the river. I kneel in the dirt and heap mounds of earth around the thin, green stalks of my tomato plants while my mother puts tools away and sweeps the walkways clean. Already, the stalks are sagging under the weight of their own limbs so I push stakes into ground and tie the vines to them with small bits of floss. The clouds open up and rain, then hail, pour down. The thready tendrils and the thin yellow flesh of the buds wilt and tear under the weight of the water. The force of the rain pushes against the tomato plants, beats them down. I think of my mother's arm in front of me as I cut another piece of string and tie the small, young stalk to the stake. There are things we do, maybe senseless and futile, when we love something and want to see it grow.