Musings on a Rainy Day

By Mimi Hedl

When a friend wrote she was reading about Beatrix Potter’s garden, I heard the words “Beatrix Potter” and “garden” and flashed on my encounter with Mr. McGregor in Superior, Wisconsin. We lived across from Central Park in a great old house on a corner. Even though it was always cold in winter it felt cozy, with Dad’s books and Mom’s cooking filling the house with love.  Mr. McGregor lived right across the street from us on another corner.  McGregor’s yard was fenced in, a tall, tall fence and the gate was seldom open. I was seven or eight and curious as to what was behind that tall gate and what was in the yard. One summer day I saw the gate was open. I decided to go inside and explore. I looked right and left and didn’t see Mr. McGregor, so I walked in, a bit in a daze. There was so much to look at.

Plants grew everywhere. I bent down to check out this feathery top, in a row of many feathery tops, looking just like the carrots in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit that I loved to read. I looked lower down from the top and saw something orange and beautiful. It was a carrot! So I pulled it up. Right when I had it close to my mouth, I heard a shout and mean sounds coming from Mr. McGregor. He didn’t have a pitch fork but he had a loud voice and it sounded incredibly angry. He started to come after me. I ran as he roared, “Get out of my garden and don’t you ever come back!”

I’ve thought of that encounter over the years and have wondered what made Mr. McGregor so mean. I also wondered if I had finished eating the carrot. Gardeners may yell at squirrels or groundhogs, the deer and raccoons, voles and moles that burrow underground and eat our root crops but I’ve never heard a gardener complain about a child exploring someone’s garden. We may ask a child not to pick this or that and explain why we’ve done that. One “child”, Leo, in his 40’s, was picking our strawberries, not one or two, but all of them! He was embarrassed and we sent him home with a nice mess and a gentle castigation. Another time I let my daughter know she shouldn’t pick ALL the flowers when she blithely walked through the garden with a neighbor girl showing her all the pretty things. I hope I was gentle.

I shouldn’t have gone into Mr. McGregor’s garden. I should’ve knocked on his door. I was shy. The gate was open. I was curious. We gardeners can be territorial. Our gardens are our domains, worlds we’ve created, an extension of ourselves. We want to protect them, honor them. We notice intruders of any kind and do not spare words addressing the aggressors. Still, I can’t help but wonder what a pleasant encounter I could’ve had with Mr. McGregor if he had shown me a little mercy.

On a busy Superior street about eight blocks away somebody had a big old crab apple tree in their backyard. A gang of us kids would climb the tree and sit up there eating the sour apples until if we ate one more we’d probably puke. They tasted kinda like the Lik-M-Aid we’d buy in a paper envelope at the corner grocery along that busy road in the opposite direction.

Out the back door of 901 4^th Avenue East in Superior, Mom had a long bed of chives on one side and on the other side a row of lily of the valley. I would eat and eat the chives and smell and smell the lily of the valley. One year, for Mother’s Day, sixty years after the fact, I sent Mom a bundle of lily of the valley, pips and flowers, so she could smell them again. I always think of her when they bloom, likewise with peonies, that grew in a long row by the driveway. Mom would pick bouquets of this fragrant flower and set them on the dining room table. Yet when asked at her 90^th birthday party what flower she favored, she stumped us all with her answer ─ the daisy, the humble daisy.

Food was an ever-present thought in childhood. It was great when we discovered something we could eat that grew wild. Those are the only food stuffs I remember from childhood. I would’ve learned lots more if Mr. McGregor had become my friend. Now I have my own paradise where I constantly find something to nibble on and keep a salt shaker handy for people like my daughter’s friend Lysa’s sister, Tara. When she visited years ago, Tara walked through the garden eating the fresh tomatoes. She was in complete shock. She couldn’t believe how good they tasted and just wished she had a salt shaker. I should have run in to get one, but she was so happy going from one plant to another and sampling all the tomatoes.

Here you’ll see some of what has enchanted me this spring. Thanks to Hilary for taking a photo of the cover page of The Tale of Peter Rabbit in the childhood book her son’s inherited. We kids found magic and wonder and never tired of the stories in that Better Homes and Gardens Storybook.  Remember Angleworms on Toast!!