“What’s wrong, Dad?”
He placed the paper in front of me.
The county had received a complaint about agricultural activity on his residential property. An inspection was scheduled for Thursday, and the letter warned that his garden could violate local zoning regulations.
I looked through the kitchen window.
Beyond the porch stood half an acre of the most beautiful vegetable garden I’d ever known. Nine rows of green beans, hundreds of tomato plants, potatoes, squash, cucumbers, carrots, onions, and towering sweet corn filled the carefully arranged beds.
There wasn’t a weed anywhere.
My father, Arne Lindqvist, was seventy-nine. He had been born in that house in 1947, just as his father had been raised on the same land. After decades working at a paper mill and driving a school bus, he had devoted his retirement to gardening.
My mother, Marta, had died three years earlier after a brief battle with pancreatic cancer. They had been married fifty-one years.
