Who the Beans Are For
The letter came on a Tuesday.
I was standing at the sink rinsing out Dad’s coffee pot when he opened it. I heard the envelope tear. Then nothing. No sound at all.
I turned around.
Dad was sitting at the kitchen table with his reading glasses down his nose, holding a single sheet of paper. He read it once. Then he turned it over to see if there was anything on the back. There wasn’t. He turned it back over and read it again.
“Dad? What is it?”
He didn’t answer right away. He set the paper down on the table and smoothed it flat with both hands, the way he smooths the soil after he plants a seed.
“Says here,” he said slowly, “I’ve got unmaintained agricultural use in a residential zone.”
“What?”
He slid the letter across the table to me.
It was from the county. Code Enforcement Division. There was a seal at the top and a case number and a lot of words that all meant the same thing.
A complaint has been received regarding the property at 1147 Ridge Road. An inspection will be conducted on Thursday, August 14. Please be advised that unmaintained agricultural use in a residential zone may constitute a public nuisance under County Ordinance 14-207.
I read it twice. Then I looked out the kitchen window.
Out past the back porch, past the clothesline, past the old red shed, was my father’s garden.
Half an acre. Nine rows of green beans, climbing up strings he tied by hand every May. Three hundred tomato plants, staked and caged, heavy with fruit. Potatoes. Squash. Onions. Beets. Carrots. Cucumbers sprawling over a wire fence. Two long rows of sweet corn, taller than me, rustling in the morning wind. A patch of strawberries along the edge that my mother planted thirty years ago.
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.
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.
“People,” he said.
That was it. That was the whole answer.
I waited for him to say more. He didn’t. He just kept tying the tomato plant with a strip of old bedsheet, his big knotted fingers moving slow and careful.
I figured he was giving them away to the neighbors. Or taking them to church. Or maybe just letting them rot. I didn’t ask again.
I should have.
The neighbor was a man named Brent.
Brent Hollis. He’d built the big gray house on the old Swenson lot last spring. Continue HERE
