Growing Pains, Culturally Speaking

When I was a kid growing up in Johnson City, my grandmother used to take me to a department store called Massengill’s. I used to like to look at the beautiful bride’s dresses, and it was a really neat old-fashioned downtown department store - the kind that have mostly gone extinct in the South - and all the employees seemed old to me. The fact is they had all worked together in that store their whole adult lives, making a career of not just selling clothes but of helping women assemble for themselves a distinctly personal look. Good taste and elegance were part and parcel of a real fit.

Anyway that’s not really the point of this post at all, but it serves as a kind of character build-up to one lady in particular who made an impression on me as a young girl, and I thought of her again this weekend. I am ashamed not to remember her name. She was way past the age of retirement when I knew her, and used to tell me stories about life during WWII, a time in which she was already middle-aged. Come to think of it (and the thought really just did occur to me) she was probably in her early forties during the war’s peak, and I’m in my early forties now. Huh. Weird.

Anyway, one of the stories she told me was about so-called “victory gardens.” Shortages and rations made gardening a necessity for folks in wartime, and government propaganda promoted the family garden as means to victory. If you grew your own vegetables, you fed your family and gave patriotic service to your country. It probably also kept people busy and took their minds off their loved ones abroad and the uncertain future that lay ahead.

So the old lady at the department store used to tell me about how her garden expanded each year, even in the years after the war, and she grew nearly every kind of vegetable common to this part of the country, and canned and preserved everything she and her family needed year after year until she got too old to labor outdoors.

At a party this weekend I spoke to a woman who has started doing the same thing, on a small scale, but she has ambitions for creating a much larger garden next year. We discussed the rising cost of food and how it is unlikely to abate with the increasing demands of a petroleum-based economy that is running ever drier as global demand increases exponentially to critical levels, affecting the cost of food production in particular. It isn’t going to get better, not for a long time.

I’ve heard of other people taking up gardening as more than just a hobby, with a goal beyond merely producing enough homegrown tomatoes for summer treats. People I wouldn’t have thought particularly green-thumbed are getting serious about learning how to produce enough vegetables to sustain them through the fall and winter, how to can and preserve. And for the first time in my life, I’m interested in it. I won’t be able to garden on a grand scale this year, but friends are planning to rent land next year to form a cooperative garden.

Apart for the economic incentives, there just seems to be something more spiritually wholesome about dropping the habit of buying bell peppers shipped from half way around the world, or settling for dull, listless strawberries dyed red after being picked unripened. And why not have good tomatoes year-round, the kind that burst with flavor only provided by a carefully tended garden? We used to can them every year when I was growing up. My grandparents always grew tomatoes, green beans, and corn, three staples always found lining their shelves in mason jars. We never had to buy that stuff growing up.

I’m not a half-bad baker, and bread-making as a daily enterprise is another thing I could get into. I’m pretty much over the loaves of spongy bread found in grocery stores that have about as much taste as their plastic wrapping. I could go on, I guess, but, OK, I’ll draw the line at raising chickens.

Seriously, the world is changing fast, and forcing changes in our individual lives many of us never expected. Waste is catching up with us, in other words, and it’s time to slow down, smarten up, and learn something.