After she died, I thought Dad would let the garden go. I thought he’d sell the house and move into one of those senior apartments in town, the ones with the little patios and the shuffleboard court.
He didn’t. If anything, the garden got bigger.
Dad lives alone. He eats like a bird. A bowl of oatmeal in the morning. A sandwich at noon. A piece of fish and some potatoes at night. That’s it. He’s thin as a fence post.
One summer, maybe two years ago, I stood at the edge of those nine rows of green beans and did the math in my head. There had to be hundreds of pounds of beans out there. Thousands of tomatoes. Enough potatoes to feed an army.
“Dad,” I said. “Who are all those beans for?”
He was on his knees in the dirt, tying up a tomato plant that had fallen over in the wind. He didn’t look up.
