The Obama Victory Garden

Several weeks before the First Lady of the United States started planting her kitchen garden at the White House my husband made a startling pronouncement. “We should plant a garden. A kitchen garden.”, he had said.

The suggestion surprised me, but when I thought it over it made very good sense. Eric loves to cook and one of the aspects of cooking he so cherishes is his trips to the window boxes where we grow herbs for his cooking. A small pleasure but therapeutic and inspirational nonetheless. The garden is like that, only bigger.

We chose a sunny spot in the side yard that had seen several previous iterations that each had something to offer at the time. I was talking to a friend and she asked where we had put our vegetable garden. I told her that it was in the spot where the swing set had been and then the hot tub and finally the trampoline. Oh, yes, I remember all of that she said, nodding. The same spot with so many different uses and associations.

The swing set with it’s white and pink and gray paint. It wasn’t very fancy, someone had given it to us as a hand me down. It squeaked like crazy. The baby seat. The memory of the sweet, sweet faces and chubby little hands almost makes me feel like I can’t breathe. The “train” where the girls would face each other. The constant admonishments to stop pumping so hard - it was starting to shake. Careful, you’ll flip it over.

Time passed, as it always does, and everyone outgrew the swing set which was taken off to the dump. When my parents walked into Costco and bought a new hot tub on an impulse buy (probably thought they were just going out for toilet paper), they offered us their old one. It seemed like such a good idea at the time and only one hundred dollars to have it delivered. It turns out that hot tubs can’t function without what one of the kids called “electricical.” It also turns out that an old house with Zinsco breakers does not have adequate “electricical” to power a hot tub, even a somewhat outdated one. Kaching. The electrician was a lovely man moonlighting from his real job with “Those Darn Accordians”. The house was amped up to 220 Volts or something like that and a cable was run from the house under the yard and popped up in a gray pipe to provide the requisite power.

The hot tub had its positives. I loved sitting in it during a light rain in winter when the leaves were off the trees and you could see the beautiful outline of the bare branches. It provided opportunity to be outside at night when it was dark and cold. The worries were many, however. When we first got the spa Allie was around four and had hair down to her bottom. I read something about a little one having her hair caught in the jets, getting trapped and drowning. I’m sure that is not a very frequent occurrence, but the image the was not good. One more thing to worry about.

There was an “attractive nuisance” aspect to it when Lucy became a teenager and started bringing her friends around just as we were settling into bed. The jets would be on and the kids (whoever they were) would have to talk loudly over the jets, use all the towels and drip everywhere. I tried not to think about what could be happening on the infrequent occasions we were not at home.

There was the maintenance issue which didn’t seem too problematic until we were in San Diego visiting my in-laws, one of whom is a nurse. Apparently, they hadn’t cleaned their hot tub properly and on the long drive back to San Francisco the younger girls developed all over itchy body rashes that turned out to be a nasty condition called hot tub folliculitis. Ugh. Now we had to wonder if we were being diligent enough with the chemicals.

The absolute worse experience we had with our hot tub was the August we went on vacation for several weeks following a rat problem. Before we left for the trip we decided to put out poison which I wasn’t too sure about. My brother, who knows much about much, assured me the nasty creatures would go off in search of water and die. When we got into the spa upon our return there was a horrible smell. We checked the water which looked alright but there was something so, so wrong. Thirteen rats had gone off to look for water and died under the hot tub. It really lost its allure for me after that and we got rid of it. Only a hundred dollars to have it carted away. As they rolled it out on its side over my neighbor’s driveway bits of the pink insulation began falling out with rat crap dropping all over the place.

The trampoline. Another attractive nuisance. Another potential source of danger. Different parents had different policies. My next door neighbor said her little boys were not allowed on it. Period. Some parents didn’t seem to care about anything their kids did. At the time we also had a dog who used the back yard as her bathroom and we were not always so timely about the scooping. The kids’ dad, a lawyer, joked that we should have children from other families sign a waiver that they wouldn’t sue us if they broke their necks OR stepped in dog poop. Funny.

After a time the novelty wore off and it was rare that anyone actually jumped on the trampoline. It became more a place to gather and sunbathe, do homework or host the occasional pajama party. Other than being hideously large and truly ugly, I didn’t really have a problem with it. Over the years sun damaged the stretchy part attached to the springs and bits began to flake off. Unfortunately, one winter we had a flood in the neighborhood and our garage and front and back yards were left covered with smelly mud. Fortunately, the town where we live provided pick up service for all the damaged goods and, without consulting the children, I decided the trampoline was terminally ill and dragged it out to the rubbish pile. There were a few little peeps of discontent, but we all pretty much knew those days were gone.

That was early January 2006. Fast forward to the spring of 2009. There have been some changes in this country. There have been some changes around here. My husband and I divorced. He has remarried his first wife. Eric and I were married two years ago. We have tried “blending” our families with abject failures as well as some successes. Our youngest daughters are now nineteen. We underwent great trauma when Eric had a catastrophic motorcycle accident from which we are both still healing. My chosen profession, residential real estate sales, has gone in the dumper. My plan B, staging homes for sale, has also gone in the dumper. We are still buying this house from my ex-husband and when we finish paying him off it won’t be worth what we agreed to pay. Our two youngest are in expensive colleges in Connecticut and Scotland. Some costly therapy has been necessary.

When Eric and I met we each had apartments and offices where we would go to work. Between us we had two cars and a motorcycle. I had half a house and he had cash in the bank. We have dwindled down to one car. Now he has an office. Mine has been shut down, but we have the garden.

Because of the wars and our reduced economic circumstances, we started to call it the Victory garden. Because of the our new administration and our hope for the future, we now call it the Obama Victory Garden. We have the sweet peas and climbing beans and squash and tomatoes. We have spinach and Swiss chard. We’re hosting a little dinner party on Saturday and Eric will pick something fresh from the garden to serve our guests. The garden is pretty and peaceful. It’s wonderfully relaxing to just look at it. We will have grandchildren in a few years and they may need swings and hot tubs and trampolines but we won’t need to provide them. We have the garden with this strange gray, plastic periscope poking up between the carrots and basil. People always ask about it and I smile to myself and tell them it was the source of electricity for the hot tub we used to have.