O'Henry, Seamus, and Myron

 

This sparse box represents roughly half of our peach harvest this year, plucked from an O’Henry tree planted the year before the pandemic. 

It survived.

Harvests bring to mind our family patriarch, the late Myron Olson, a part-time farmer who could push the plough like a pro. Before he passed on in 2015, he passed down lessons on soil, irrigation, seeds, and patience.

We will not likely ever surpass his gardening expertise. But there is at least some hope for future harvests, though they will be smaller yields in humbler fields. 

DIGGING

By Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound

When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:

My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds

Bends low, comes up twenty years away

Stooping in rhythm through potato drills

Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft

Against the inside knee was levered firmly.

He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep

To scatter new potatoes that we picked,

Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.

Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

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