In honor of my beautiful mother, Betty Gardin I want to share one of my favorite stories from my book “Bearing Crosses.” The book is fictional, but has many factual family stories woven in and out and the family characters are mostly real.
This is a true story and exactly how it happened:
One summer I drove up to Blue Ridge by myself for a weekend visit. Mom met me in the kitchen with a cup of coffee as I walked in the back door.
“Hi, Mom. Your garden is gorgeous this year. I want a tour.”
“Your father! Listen to this. We got the garden planted and everything is coming up just fine. And then your father decides we need cabbage!”
She says this like cabbage is akin to planting kudzu.
“So?”
“Well, I told him, cabbage is 66 cents a plug down at the co-op and a head of cabbage is only 99 cents in the grocery store. And it takes up a lot of room. But he kept insisting. So I go down to the co-op and I pay 66 cents a piece for six plugs. And within an hour a swarm of rabbits came in and ate every bit of it. So Betty 0 and Rabbits 1.”
“Wow that’s too bad.”
“That’s not the end of it. So your Dad goes up to Home Depot and buys some chicken wire and stretches it around the plot where the cabbage was. And then he sends me back to the co-op for six more plugs. Now if you are any good at math you will see that we are already under water in this cabbage project.”
“Let’s see 66 cents times twelve is…”
“And the next morning those rabbits had gotten under the fence and eaten every bit of that cabbage. That’s Betty 0 and Rabbits 2.
I’m giggling now. “I hope you’ve given up.”
“Oh, no. He sent me back to the co-op for six more plugs. He’s been waiting all day for you to get here and help him fix the fence.”
I looked out the window and saw my father standing vigil over the cabbage with a big stick. I don’t know how I missed him when I pulled in. It was getting dusky outside and I really hoped he hadn’t been doing that all day. I went out to join him.
“Oh, good, you’re here.” He laid his stick on the ground. “I’m going to pull this chicken wire and bend the bottom edge like a lip. I need you to pull the other end as tight as you can.”
I did pull. I pulled hard. Dad had these stake things that he was pushing into the ground as he worked his way around tucking the bottoms.
But as the sun began to set, the rabbits came. Must have been fifty of them. With red beady eyes, they came from the forest and ran hard at the chicken wire. Like a plague from Exodus they came. The fence bent forward from the sheer weight of their numbers, creating a ramp that allowed them to scamper right over the top and into the garden.
“Pull harder!” yelled my Dad.
“I’m pulling as hard as I can. And it doesn’t matter. Even if we get it fixed, we have fifty rabbits INSIDE the fence. And look, the cabbage is gone.”
We both collapsed on the ground, breathless in defeat.
Mom walked outside. “Betty 0 Rabbits 3.”
It was really Betty 0 Rabbits 18 but I wasn’t going to dare say that.
So the next morning, my Mom informed us that she was taking over the rabbit operation. She went back to the co-op for six more plugs. When she returned, she fixed Dad and me some lunch and told us to stay in the house. She did not need our help. She took Dad’s fence down and used some wire snips and cut it into pieces. With these pieces she made little cages which she sat down over the six new heads of cabbage and anchored them several inches under the earth. Try as they might that evening, the rabbits couldn’t get her cabbage.
“Betty 1, Rabbits 3.”
I guess she could have said, “Frank and Penny 0,” but she is too polite for that.
When the cabbage came in and my dad was enjoying his coleslaw he would say, “Now wasn’t that worth it?” And Mom would remind him that each head of cabbage had cost them $8.64 if you added the chicken wire. But my father was unfazed. He was so proud of his warrior wife and loved to tell anyone who would listen how she had fought the bunnies and won.
