Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, How Does Your Garden Grow?

Dear Boo and Bubble,

Recently, Captain and I were in Tuskegee, Alabama, where we were looking for some information about your great, great, great, great grandfather Joseph Benson Cottrell who lived there over 150 years ago.  During the course of the day, we visited with a 90-year-old gentleman named Roy Corbitt who acts as sort of a historian who keeps quite extensive records on the city.  He’s also a mortician.  Not that you’ll need to know anytime soon, but a mortician is someone who buries people when they die.

While we were chatting with him, I was reminded of a story great granddaddy Schaefer used to tell.  It involved his two half-brothers Charlie and John Oliver.  (If you need to be reminded of who they were, you can go back to the post called “It’s All Sugar.”) 

Both Charlie and John Oliver lived in Greer, SC, right around the corner from each other.  Charlie had his own business downtown while John Oliver worked at the local funeral home…..he was a mortician. 

Every summer, Charlie cultivated a luscious vegetable garden in his back yard filled with squash, beans, okra, and tomatoes.  The yield was usually so abundant that he could supply his neighbors with enough bounty to “put up” a sufficient store for the winter.

John Oliver, on the other hand, had no such thing with maybe the exception of some wild onions popping up in his lawn.

One day, Granddaddy Schaefer was visiting with John Oliver and remarked about this. 

“John O.,” he said, “I was thinking the other day that Charlie has this incredible garden every year and you don’t seem to have any interest.”

“Well, Schaefer,” John O. replied, “I’ll tell you, it’s like this…..when I put something in the ground, I don’t want it to come back up!”