Aunt Ann's Pit

The back yard of the 1910 Victorian home consisted of a treacherously cracked composite stone and concrete walkway dividing two 12x25 rectangles. One side was grass and the other was a garden in the center of which was a 5x10 pit nearly two feet deep.

Surrounding the pit were neat rows of flowers, fruit and vegetables, with small plasic labels sunk into the soil on miniature plastic pickets. Anything organic that came out the back door of that home was in a big pail, travelling down the sunken porch's steps and back up, over the uneven walk, and across to the pit where the pail's contents were distributed, "For the birds!" Aunt Ann said.

On hands and knees, gardening in her mu'u-mu'u and glittery, elastic-topped floral slippers, a Bel-Air menthol cigarette clenched with rolled red lips coiling smoke around her head, she'd toil away caring for melons and beets and squash, carrots and peas and beans and tomatoes and rhubarb and flowers, producing a garden that seemed to beam the liveliest greens of leaf and stalk up through dappled daylight's cover of hardwood trees; the broadest selection of green hues in all of plantdom, I decided, as a pre-schooler at her side.

Kentucky's soil may have grown the best corn to ever birth bourbon, certainly conducive to Kentucky Burley tobacco growing, but I doubt it rivalled the richness of my Aunt Ann's pit, a woman whom the Commonwealth should have recognized as the Mother of All Compost, whose heart was as giant and gentle and generous as her sunflowers.