November 11, 2010

This is written on November 10 for publication on November 11.
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November 11 is Veteran’s Day. I am a Navy veteran, and so is my former husband. Therefore, this is an acceptable day for me to ask for help, especially from all other veterans who might know the answer to my question.
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Do you know my granddaughters? I don’t. Actually they’re my step-grandaughters, because my daughter-in-law married my son some years after the State of Michigan stole her daughters from her on the perjured testimony of a convicted child molester.
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They’re sisters, but they don’t look alike. Jasmine is mixed race, black and white, and looks black, whereas Robin looks all white. We think they were adopted or taken as foster children by a family willing to take them both. Therefore my daughter-in-law was not allowed to appeal the decision; she was told that it was too late to do so, although statute law said otherwise.
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But I’m going to forget about step-anything. They’re my granddaughters, and I want my daughter-in-law to at least have contact with them, if she can’t get them back. She loves them and misses them, and I love my daughter-in-law. When we had our family reunion this past spring, my poor daughter-in-law wept several times because seeing our happy, boisterous family made her miss her daughters that much more.
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If you know Jasmine and Robin, please tell them that their mother still loves them, and she has posted her maiden name in every site that she could do so, in hopes that one of them would look for her and find her.
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Now I want to speak directly to them; if you know them, please bring this to their attention.
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Jasmine, Robin, I’m your grandmother, and I miss you and I want to see you. So does your granddad, and your new dad; he has no other children, and he wants very much to be known as your dad. But none of us miss you as much as your mom does.
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Your mom and dad gave me a purse-size electronic picture album and when I get it out to show to people, your pictures come up first. I’m very proud of you, because you learned to do housework so that when you grew up and married you wouldn’t be too ignorant to know how to care for a household. I think a mother who doesn’t teach her children how to do housework is guilty of child abuse. You were reading well early in your childhood, and I expect your school grades have been uniformly good. You had different biological fathers, but you have the same mother, and she is intelligent and a good reader and writer, so I’m sure you have talent and ability. I hope, before I die, that I will get to meet you at least once. After I die, I’ll find out where you are and I’ll keep watch over you and do whatever I can to lead you to your mother. If anybody has told you that she no longer loves you or wants you, that isn’t true, and I think you know that isn’t true.
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As I look through the garden window and see into the neighbors’ yards, and see their children out romping in the snow and playing with the dog, I wish very much that I could see you in the backyard. We don’t have a dog and you’re too old for a swing set, but you’re old enough that you would enjoy the garden. It would make me very happy to be working in the garden with one of you on each side of me. We could transplant the lilies to the front yard, and then start the blackberries in the empty beds where the lilies are now. I wonder why I thought of that. Maybe because lilies and blackberries are like the two of you cuddled together?
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I don’t know you yet, but I love you because you’re my granddaughters. I show your pictures to everybody, and I don’t say “These are my daughter-in-law’s children.” I say, “These are my grandchildren.” If anybody doesn’t approve, that person knows to keep his or her mouth shut.
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And what does all that have to do with books through the garden window? Well, today I’m talking about Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening. Families in which the members are companions are successful families, and the two of you were close companions to each other and to your mom. The social worker didn’t think it was appropriate for you two to be making dinner because your mom had a migraine. I would be ashamed if I were a mom whose 13-year-old daughter DIDN’T know how to make dinner if I was in bed with a migraine, and if I were the daughter who didn’t know how to make dinner I would be ashamed of myself.
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Plants know how to take care of one another. But it’s important to put the right plants together. If the right family had been kept together, you’d have your mom and dad and you’d know you were part of OUR family, and we’ve been in Texas since before it was legal for Anglos to move to Texas. I want you to see your great-great-great grandmother Rebecca’s grave, which we showed to your mom this spring. I reminded her then that now she’s a member of OUR family, and we love her.
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Now about companion planting. It can be complicated, because some plants go well together and some plants don’t. One thing that confused me before I read this book is that I know crops should be rotated, but I also know that asparagus and tomatoes go well together, but asparagus can grow in the same place for thirty or more years. Then, reading this book, I found out that tomatoes are unusual in that they don’t have to be rotated. So after I get the asparagus planted, I can put the tomatoes beside them every year, and they’ll do well.
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I also learned that yarrow, which I grow because it comes in so many different colors that look so pretty together (like the two of you), are beneficial to just about every other plant. It’s worthwhile, if the highway department cuts down yarrow when it’s mowing, to grab the cut-off yarrow and put it in your compost, because then the compost will be even more useful in helping fruit and vegetables to grow better and be healthier.
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I HATE wild morning glory, otherwise known as bindweed, because it tries to strangle every other plant it gets near, like that evil man strangled your family. But this book tells me that wild morning glory is beneficial to corn. Maybe that’s why an area of the yard that in the past had been devastated by bindweed yielded good corn. It also told me that a squirt of vinegar in the center of each bindweed plant would kill it. I know that most weeds that are killed by vinegar grow right back, but apparently several successive squirts of vinegar into the bindweed will eventually get rid of it. Yay! Next year I won’t let wild morning glory take over my northeast flower bed.
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Well, we can’t do much by squirting an evil man with vinegar, but when you and your mother finally get back together, I think your love for one another will be strengthened, especially as your new family–aunts, uncles, cousins–gather protectively around you as the bindweed protects the corn.
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This is a comparatively old book, from Garden Way Publishing. The ISBN is 0-88266-065-9. But it’s available used on Amazon, as are several other books on companion gardening by the same author, Louise Riotte. There’s even a related book available on Kindle:
Carrots Love Tomatoes – Kindle Edition – Kindle eBook (Jan. 2, 1998) by Louise Riotte
Buy: $9.66
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So I’ve learned a lot from this book, and I have marked a lot of places that have suggestions I will try next year.
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But if I had to make a choice, I would turn my back on companion gardening if I could just get hold of my companion granddaughters.

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