Now that I am really into gardening, I am learning how to hoe. It is not as easy as you would think. At first I was bludgeoning the weeds with my dull blade. Then I realized the hoe should be sharpened. That’s how you can get the hoe to scrape the ground without destroying the row.
It seemed that Daddy must have told me this once, but then I realized that it could not have been me that he was talking to—I don’t remember picking up a hoe until recently. No, he must have been talking to someone else within my hearing. Maybe my mother was the one who hoed. I do know that in his later years, my dad used to get his garden weeded in a fairly unique way—without ever having to touch a hoe.
Family stories are usually passed from the older generation to the younger, but this is one story that the younger ones gave to me. Because I lived away while my nephews were growing up, I did not get to see the events they described. It is this story, though, that makes me think of my dad each time I pick up a hoe.
Walter Moreau was the patriarch of our family, the glue that held all of us together. He loved us all and, at various times, hated us all. He laughed and joked, hollered and cussed, smoked and drank. He was real, and because he was real, we could be, too. His house was always home, no matter that we were grown and had houses of our own. Each day he could be found sitting in his rocking chair next to the heater in the kitchen, with one or another of the family sharing a pot of coffee with him. His children and grandchildren were in and out of his house as though they lived there, and a cohesiveness rarely found in families formed among the group who shared his kitchen and his coffee.
In the years before he died, he didn’t leave the kitchen very much. He was ill, and his movements were limited. He still kept a garden. Of course, he could not do any of the work involved. He could not till or plant or weed. He could not hoe. Yet nothing was done in the garden without his direct involvement.
Each day, the nephews who lived nearby would come in for coffee or just to visit. It was then that Walter would shuffle toward the kitchen window, point to some area of the garden, and tell whoever was visiting what needed to be done. Just his telling had the effect of a command to the person hearing. When the cup of coffee was finished, the visitor, on his way out, would do the thing that needed doing.
Not everyone, though, got through the task in the way Walter wanted it done. It was then that the tap on the glass could be heard from the garden rows. Walter would be standing at the window, tapping to get their attention. The person in the garden would look at Walter, try to decipher what it was he wanted (which was not always an easy task), and then do his best to get it right. It was this constant tapping, looking, tapping, looking, that finally got the job done and caused many of our young ones to become pretty proficient “cussers” themselves. That was the way he got his garden tilled, planted, and weeded. That is the way he got it hoed. His tap on the glass was the only gardening tool he needed.
In the years since his death, we have often laughed about his tapping on the glass. The young grandsons who worked in his garden now have grandchildren of their own. I don’t know how many of them have gardens. Maybe they are still too young yet. Gardening seems to appeal to the older generation among us. As of yet, none of us are in such poor health that we have to resort to Walter’s method of tapping on the glass. But it is good to know we have another alternative beside a hoe if we need it.
Walter stories are still a prominent part of our family gatherings. He has been dead for twenty-five years, and we still miss him.
Walter Paul Moreau
April 6, 1912 – November 19, 1985
