Esther Staub had a green thumb and hair tinted red like the skin on a tomato. The annual seeds that she planted in her garden came back like perennials in the Spring. The heads of her zinnia flowers were larger than a child’s face. Her marigolds towered above the sunflowers. She gave the thumbs-up to trees too. Apples, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, walnuts, chestnuts and pears grew on her property. She pruned them all. Long before the widespread popularity of organically grown vegetables, the Irish farm girl planted eyes of blue potatoes in her plot that she special ordered from a Gurnee’s seed catalog. Gardening was her life. More than a simple share cropper, she loved the tranquility of the country air and working outside. She preferred the company of crops to arrogant people. She cultivated fake plastic flowers from the five and ten cent store in her garden too. She told me she put plastic roses outside as a reminder that man will never outgrow the simple beauty of nature. The artificial flowers were a solution for confronting possible droughts and served as “boobie traps” to unsuspecting eyes . Most never knew how Esther managed to have roses bloom in March. Friends came from all over to buy fresh produce and eggs and to take a look around her lush estate. Most assumed she simply had a green thumb. They never noticed that many of the roses on her bushes were plastic.
Highways were far away. The road that led to Esther’s farm was dirt paved. She drank from a well. The closest neighbors lived acres away. She owned the miles of fertile mountain ridge land separating her farm from the rest of stuck-up society.
Her best friend was Eva Bumgardner. Eva was the only one besides me who was allowed to walk around inside my grandmother’s garden. Others, including animals, were kept on the outskirts by a wire mesh fence. Esther planted fake flowers in her garden not only to fool business associates, but to pull the wool over Eva’s eyes. She fooled me too when I first saw them.
“Yes, Meme. It’s pretty.”
“Look again! See that? It’s fake. You never would have known, would ya? Look how I put it in there right next to the real ones.”
Eva was a short, robust, country girl with curly hair and thick glasses that darkened automatically when the sun came out. It wasn’t her real hair. It was a wig. Even I knew it was fake hair. I was only four years old and spotted that wig like a Japanese beetle on the rhubarb. My grandma, didn’t know that Eva was as bald as an eagle underneath that hair mat or at least she pretended as though she didn’t know that what was swirling above Eva’s ladybug eyes wasn’t real hair. I asked grandma about Eva’s wig, not to be offensive, but wanting one of my own. Meme told me not to say anything about it to Eva. It would hurt her feelings. She promised if I kept quiet about Eva’s hair, she’d give me one of her old wigs. I obeyed and later that evening when we were inside husking corn and watching Lawrence Welk, she le me put the wig on like a fake flower. I did a jig around the trailer while she tapped her foot, propped up in a reclining chair.
Grandma liked to see her friend Eva laugh. She fooled Eva with the fake plastic flowers that grew in her garden next to the real plants. Eva visited Esther’s farm every day. My grandmother lived in a pink mobile home on land that was once a family farm. There were so many thorny rose buses around her home that she didn’t have to worry about anyone breaking in. My mom and dad took over the big farm house, just yards away. The land was handed down through several generations by affluent English men, one of which she married and obtained the Taylor name from before taking on the role of a Staub. There were very few animals remaining on what had become Esther’s farm in 1972– a few chickens clucked around and a goat named Roger kept Meme company while I was at school or when Eva wasn’t there to cheer her up.
“Jesus Christ, look at this garden, Esther! I ain’t ever seen an ear of corn grow as large as a foot,” Eva yapped. It was a sunny Sunday morning. Esther was on her way to church, dressed in her best polyester skirt and matching purple blouse. Typically, Esther ignored the Sabbath and worked in her garden, despite what the good book had to say regarding the matter of rest. She was worried that day. She was running out of money. She needed to go pray to either get on the Price Is Right game show, find a rich man, or sell off more property just to pay the property taxes.
I was happy that Eva showed up. I didn’t feel like going to Sunday School.
Eva took her sweet time and smelled every open bloom in the garden as Meme bent over in her pink polyester skirt and commenced to pulling out weeds from between the rows of crops growing in near- perfect parallel lines. Smelling all the pretty flowers was a habit of Eva’s. She knew that taking the time to sniff every flower and comment on the aroma would keep Esther from going to church. Eva wouldn’t step her foot into “one of those God forsaken places” even if someone paid her a million to sit in a pew, she explained to Meme, trying to convince her not to waste a beautiful, sunny summer morning singing hymns inside an old, stuffy country church.
Esther stood with her hoe propped under her arm pit and listened to Eva run her mouth in the bright morning sun while she sniffed all the flowers, even the blossoms on the cucumber plants.
“Does she ever shut up?” Meme whispered to me as Eva rattled on about her son, Jim, the game warden whose job it was to protect and preserve wildlife on Stone Creek Mountain. Eva liked to brag about a how darn smart her son supposedly was.
“He should’ve gone to college, Esther. He’s a bright boy and a hell of a lot smarter than his daddy ever was!”
“I guess I will not be going to church today,” Meme replied, taking off her good white shoes so that they wouldn’t get dirty. She walked a little further into the garden, permitting Eva to bend her ear a bit more. Eva talked on and on as bumble bees fluttered around in the warm August air, pollinating the flowers, just as Eva was busy doing. She looked just like a bumble bee in my view. The constant humming from her lips was very similar to that of an insect, and the way she had to poke her nose against every bloom was almost obscene.
“You look like a wasp in those glasses, Eva. Why are you smelling that? I told you that pumpkin blossoms don’t have a smell. Stop that. Watch out! You’re stepping on the vine.”
Eva bent down and placed her nose on a plastic pink rose and flat out lied to grandma– “Oh, this one smells real good, Esther!”
“Eva, you are going to go to hell if you don’t stop fibbin’. That’s a plastic flower. Look at it closely,” grandma chuckled while rolling her eyes and smiling at me.
“Oh Esther, you are so clever. It only goes to show how beautiful your flower garden is. It sure as shit looks real,” sniffed Eva.
“Eva, you talk too much. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“No! I talk so much when I’m here because you are my only real friend and I have no one else to talk to. I keep it all inside. I can’t help it, Esther. I’m sorry! I should have came dressed- up today and gone to church with you, but I don’t feel like it. I’m going home now. Pray for me while you’re at it! I know I can be too much sometimes,” Eva said sadly while scratching her wig and swatting a swarm of gnats that didn’t seem to bother Meme or me the same way.
“Besides Charlie, You are the only friend who comes to see my flowers. Talk all you want. I don’t care. Charlie don’t want to go to church either. You make my garden grow,” insisted Esther as she plucked a dandelion and threw it from her garden.
Esther and Eva were a pair who could upset the tranquility of a library simply by reading in the same room together. Other women their age called them trouble makers and shit-stirrers. They valued their time alone together away from those hags– working in the garden away from the rest of the world which seemed to embrace the convenience of modern supermarkets and fast foods. They remembered a time when life was simple when almost everyone grew their own food, milked their own cows and collected eggs from chickens that lived the good life– not from hens that were cooped up all day in chicken factories.
When not working in the garden, the farm girls spent their time chasing rich old men together. They were both widows and had lots of cash in the bank. They did not spend their golden years trying to raise the dead or in church. Life was too short and they were offered a new lease on it when their husbands died in the same year and they found each other in a cemetery one May afternoon while there placing flowers from the five and ten cent store on the tombstones of their husbands that were planted in close proximity.
“Was that your husband?”
“Yes– old selfish bastard,” Eva said to the stranger Esther who seemed to be talking to herself over a piece of marble.
“This is my husband here, or it was my husband,” Esther said. “I think I have finally learned how to love him.”
They became best friends that instant.
