The DNA of Duree

When I reflect on my love of all things homegrown, I do detect some heritage.

I had next to nothing in common with my grandfather who passed away last week. His name was Duree. 

Until he moved into assisted living, he had lived in “the old home place” where he was born at the end of a driveway-turned-dead-end street that bears my maiden name. 

I’ll attempt to describe him to you, against my better judgment. I always tell people he’s indescribable. I’m breaking my own rule.

His Easley-twanged muttering required translation. “Damn Yankees” wouldn’t call the words he uttered English; they might even debate the value they held as any form of communication. 

I, by contrast, communicate for a living. 

He laughed often, and often for no reason anyone else could follow. 

I’ve always been confused about whether he completed school through the sixth or ninth grades. We know for certain he spent a semester at North Greenville University (he felt called to preach, you see, after some questionable encounters with the IRS as a self-employed carpenter); but they somehow realized he didn’t have a high school diploma after he was well into his classes and told him he couldn’t continue. 

He built many of the houses in the established neighborhoods in Powdersville.

And he could grow things.

I loved my grandfather, but we were not close in any conventional sense. That is to say, there was not enough conventional about him for me to even conceive of what a “close” relationship would have meant. 

So it was a strange thing when my dad said to me, after observing my first brush with tomato gardening 7 or 8 years ago, “Wow, you are your Papa’s granddaughter.”

I’d never been given a personal attribute association with him before.

But when I reflect on the meaning for me of the pop-pop-popping of snapping pole beans… a big wooden bowl of unshelled pecans and the casual crack-crack over conversations with my grandmother in that same unleveled kitchen he used until the roof was caving in… my first (and only) taste of an unripe persimmon from his tree and his cackling as my face puckered and eyes grew wide… 

When I reflect on my love of all things homegrown, I do detect some heritage.

He once (accidentally) grew cantaloupe from the scraps of an old melon he tossed under an unruly hedge. 

He was canning his produce until he left his home. Safe? Unlikely. But he had diabetes and took Pepsi with a shot of insulin, so why not?

In my marketing and writing and computering ways, I found my way back to the garden I never actually had. I didn’t help in his. My parents had a garden when I was a kid, and I wandered the path to pluck blueberries, blackberries and honeysuckle, but I was little help beyond that. I remember my dad digging fish guts into the beds for tomatoes and my mom reading a book called Carrots Love Tomatoes on companion planting, but it never drew me in.

And we ate fairly seasonally growing up—enjoying lots of things on the grill. I remember my dad grilling us a feast and my sisters and I missed it because Aunt Kathy took us to Gatti Town on Woodruff Road. The food was all cold on the set table when we got home and he was out mowing the lawn. Hannah and I cried in the bathroom, thinking he was mad at us. (He was mad at his sister.)

I can’t think straight come January these days, and my tiny raised bed garden gets more than its share of attention. The year I had my first baby I just threw some sunflower seeds in the beds, and we spent her first three weeks of life enjoying the shade of a sunflower hedge from our back porch. One morning I woke up and saw a sunflower-turned-peeping-Tom from my second story bedroom window.

I’m not sure I buy the whole “green thumb” thing. In my limited experience as a gardener it seems like success has a lot more to do with where you place your attention than on any inherited or magical abilities. 

But then again… 

I do know I had next to nothing in common with my grandfather—just dirty fingernails and damn good tomatoes.