My father never taught me how to garden

My father went to Essex Agricultural Institute ('The Aggie') in Danvers MA, but hardly gardened in West Lynn where I grew up (7-21.) He never taught me to garden. Maybe it was because we rented.

But taking me along with him to the cemetary on Mother's Day, he would stop at a florist to buy a flat of hot-house pansies, his mother's favorite annual, to place on the family plot.

After retiring early (62.5) from the Lynn GE River Works, he bought a small house a block from where I'd grown up & gardened in the back yard. I'd moved away by then, & when I visited again, he showed me some Egyptian walking onions with tiny bulbs at the tip of scallion-like stalks.

He still never taught me how to garden, keeping that to himself. He was strangely secretive.
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