My potato, think i'm only a spudboy...

Today, mom invited me over for lunch. She had some leftover chicken that she reheated. Plus she made some stuffing, mashed potatos, some noodles and gravy for everything, except for I suppose the noodles. At any rate, it was all delicious, as Mama Polt's cooking is known to be, and we ate most of it.

There were a few leftovers, and as she was putting the mashed potatos into a container to use later, she said, "Well, that's the last of dad's potatos." We kinda looked at each other, a bit taken aback. We didn't cry or anything, but the realization was a bit striking.

In the back yard, almost from the summer they bought the house, dad had a garden. It was probably 100 feet long, maybe 30 feet wide. Every year, there was row after row of corn and potatos. He also grew green beans, lima beans, cantelopes, watermelons, pumpkins, squash, peas, some years there were even tomatos and strawberries. I'm sure there were other things as well that I can't recall, but they were the staples.

Dad spent hours in his garden. He tilled it, planted it, weeded it, spent at least of portion of every day from spring until fall puttering around down there. And dug up the potatos, pulled and husked the corn, pulled and shelled the beans and peas. We frequently had so many cantelopes, we couldn't eat them all. We gave them away to family and friends. I took several in to work and charged like a dollar a melon. They went like hotcakes.

Mom would freeze the things, so even at Christmas, we could have 'fresh' corn or peas. And they kept the potatos in the bushel baskets in the cold cellar off the basement. We'd have so many of the potatos we ended up selling those to family as well, at insanely low prices. But we always had fresh potatos when we wanted them. And by the time we ran out of last year's potatos, the new batch was just about ready to be dug up, or we had already done so.

For those of you new to the Palace, my dad died last year in October after a 5 month battle with cancer. In the spring though, before he got sick, he planted the garden. And mom, somehow, kept up with it. But she never really was into the garden that much, she helped and all, but it was really dad's playground. And she has no desire to kept it up, so this summer, she's tilled it up, raked it over and planted grass. We'll never again get potatos or corn or cantelopes from his garden.

So, today, we used the last of the last batch of potatos from Papa Shockey's garden. And it just brought everything back again. We're far enough beyond it that neither of us cried. But we still were affected by it.

I don't know what she did in the moment or two of frozen silence following her statement, but I said a little thought to dad to let him know we were still thinking of him. And it made me remember I still haven't been to the grave since we buried him last year.

Tomorrow, in my travels, I have resolved, to drive out there and stop and see it. And walk over to his mother's as well. It's way overdue.

POLT Listening to "That's Not My Name" by The Ting-Tings

Your rhymes are truly insipid. - Etrigan, Shadowpact #11