LIFE'S OUTTAKES
By Daris Howard
Gazette Contributor
It was just after Christmas and the temperature was below zero outside, the snow covered the ground two feet deep, and my little four-year old daughter, Heather, was putting on her coat to venture outdoors.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I am going out to pick strawberries,” she informed me.
I told her there wouldn’t be any strawberries this time of year. “Have you been out to check?” she asked, skeptical of my knowledge on such matters.
“Well, no,” I had to admit. “Not recently.”
“Then,” she said triumphantly, “maybe there are and you just don’t know.”
There was no talking her out of it, so I put on my own coat and we trudged out, mitten in hand, to check. I thought for sure, once we got to the strawberry patch and she saw the snow piled high across it, that she would realize I was right. But she was undaunted as she was sure they were growing strawberries underneath the snow. Nothing was going to convince her otherwise except seeing for herself, so I retrieved a shovel and started to dig. We dug down to the plants, brown in their dormant state, and still she remained unconvinced. She was sure we had just dug in the wrong place.
I think we had to uncover about half of the patch before she considered I might be right, but only maybe; she still thought I might be digging in the wrong spots. By the time we finished, our neighbors were staring out their windows at us, wondering about such things as sugar sap, and pine sap, and especially about a sappy neighbor that would drag his daughter out to dig holes in the garden in the middle of winter.
I thought we were done and she would be ready to head back into the warm house, but she wasn’t ready to give up yet. She stuck her hand into her coat pocket and when she pulled it out she had corn in her little mitten. It wasn’t seed corn, but canned corn she had saved from dinner. She wanted to plant it. By this time my heart ached for my daughter that loved to garden. She was so much like me and the winter seemed so long to her.
I tried to explain to her that cooked corn wouldn’t grow anywhere, let alone out in this cold. I could see tears glisten the corners of her eyes. My mind whirred as to how I could get out of this without hurting my little daughter’s feelings. She so badly wanted to plant her corn right away. Suddenly, I had an idea. I told her I had a big pot and we would fill it with dirt and put it in a south window. Together we rummaged through the garden shed until we found the biggest planting pot we had. I dug the snow away in the garden and chiseled some frozen dirt out of it.
We set the pot in a south window and she impatiently checked it off and on all day to see when the dirt would be warm enough to plant. I tried to explain again that cooked corn would not grow, but she insisted otherwise, so we planted her corn. After I tucked her in bed, I found some leftover garden seed from the previous year, and planted it in her pot. She checked it every day and when the time finally arrived that the little shoots sprang from the soil, she was dragging me over to see.
A short time later, in early February, snow still thick on the ground, I found her again pulling on her coat and mittens. When I asked her where she was going she said she was going to check the strawberries again.
“I thought I explained that strawberries won’t grow in the winter.”
“Yes,” she answered, “but you also said cooked corn wouldn’t grow and look at my plants.” I looked at her plants, now about 6 inches high, and shook my head as I slipped off to put my coat on.
(Daris Howard, award-winning, syndicated columnist and playwright, is author of “Super Cowboy Rides” and can be contacted at daris@darishoward.com; or visit his website at http://www.darishoward.com)
