Tater Plantin Day

We always had a big garden when I was a child. We lived on a farm where we grew our chickens that laid eggs and we ate both. We raised pork, had a milk cow and grew cotton, soybeans, corn and a honkin big garden. My mother canned everything she could.

In the spring, we would buy a hundred lbs of seed potatoes and mother would cut the eyes out of them and we would get them ready to plant. Daddy would take his tractor, with a small disk and get the soil ready, and we would plant the potatoes.

His thinking was that if you didn't get them in the ground by March 20th, you wouldn't have a crop. The ground was often cold and pretty wet, but plant those potatoes, we did.

I think this was almost a rite of spring. There may have been a few buds on the trees, and there may have been a few other things turning a bit green, but he fully expected that as the leaves unfolded on the trees, there would be potatoes coming through the ground.

By the way, that was his last part of the garden. From there on it was my mother's garden, and he didn't set foot in it.

Neither of my parents are still living - my mother died in an automobile accident in June of 1969, and my father died of cancer in October, 1993. He never got the soil ready for potatoes after my mother died. There were a lot of things he never did after he lost her. He did, however, remarry, and had a good life for another 24 years. He and I became very close especially in his later years. He mellowed, and I matured. It was a sort of coming together.

I miss him, yet, I see him in my children and grandchildren, and since they remember him so well, we speak of him often.