There wasn’t a weed in it.
Not one. I’d seen Dad out there at five in the morning on his knees in the dirt, pulling weeds the size of a fingernail.
“Unmaintained,” I said.
“That’s what it says.”
“Dad. That garden is the most maintained thing in this entire county.”
He took off his reading glasses and folded them and put them in his shirt pocket.
“Well,” he said. “Somebody doesn’t think so.”
My father is seventy-nine years old.
His name is Arne Lindqvist. He was born in this house, on this land, in 1947. His father was born here before him. He worked thirty-four years at the paper mill in town until it closed, and then he worked another twelve driving a school bus, and then he retired and did what he’d always wanted to do.
He grew things.
My mother, Marta, died three years ago this October. Pancreatic cancer. Four months from the diagnosis to the funeral. They’d been married fifty-one years.
