#31 Days - Vegetables and High School Memories

 

Possible Listing of Vegetables for Our 2014 Garden

(many thanks to PhotographicDictionary.com for help jogging my memory)

Asparagus, avocado, artichoke

Beans, beet, broccoli, brussel Sprouts

Cabbage, carrot, cauliflower, celery, corn, cucumbers

Lettuce

Onions 

Pea, potatoes, pumpkins

Rhubarb

Spinach, squash, sweet potato

Tomato

Zucchini

Yeah, maybe the year after next.  As I want to include fruits, herbs, animals and grains, I should probably limit myself (arbitrarily) to 10.  Let's see how that goes.

Carrot, celery, corn, cucumber, lettuce, onion, potatoes, pumpkins, spinach, tomatoes.  Yeah, that's probably enough for the first year.

Next week, I will cover the supplies needed or useful for producing my above ten veggies.

*+*+*+*+*

The October Daily prompt for the day is:  

share a high school memory that you will never forget.

Simple.  February 15, 1979, I was a senior in high school.  February 15, 1979, was the day my father passed away at the age of 47.

He had come home a week earlier from work feeling ill.  This in itself was unusual, because he was a nose to the grindstone kind of man.  He grew up in West Virginia in poverty.  He graduated from West Virginia University (where he and my mother met), a went on to get a PhD in Chemical Engineering.  He was very intelligent, but did not particularly care for his line of work, but it put food on the table, bought a house and allowed us to go on the odd vacation now and again.

By the day before, on Valentine's Day, I knew he would not make it.  He could barely talk.  He could barely move.  He looked as if he had lost 50 pounds in the week that he had been at home.  I had a dream about him dying that night, which I've always figured was a way from the cosmos to prepare me for the actual passing.

The next day, I was actually home from school.  I remember my mother calling to me from the bedroom, asking me to call a local Christian Science Practitioner.  When she came to the phone, she asked me to go back and read from the Bible.  I stood in the hallway because I had seen my father's face, and it was twisted in the 'grin of death'.  I can still see it to this day.

Someone came over to stay with my mother until the ME came out.  I had to get out of the house.  I went to a friend's house and we drove around for a couple of hours.  When I got home, my brother had returned as well.  Other than being in shock, my mother appeared to be dealing as well as could be expected.

My bedroom was across the hall from my parents' room.  When it came time for me to go to bed, I had to ask my mother to walk back with me because my legs wouldn't take me on my own.  When we got to my door, there was a gouge in it from where they had carried my father's body out on a stretcher.

I could go on for days about memories surrounding my father's passing, but I will stop here.  The story is definitely not finished, but then at the time, neither was his.