The Briar Philosopher - Sharing the Load

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Some mornings I wake up and it’s fifty years ago in my mind. I woke up one morning last week thinking, “Hope it’s warmer today. Mommy said we were going to plant the bulbs.” I giggled a little and was relieved a little when I realized it was 50 years later and there wasn’t going to be any bulb planting. Don’t get me wrong. I love planting but nobody ever had bulbs like my momma had bulbs. There would be hundreds of them to sort and beds to rehab and planting to do.  My back would be aching by the end of the day and I’d be covered from head to toe in dirt. I’d be over it though, by the next day and eagerly awaiting seeing the first green leaves springing up from the ground. 

After the initial realization that it wasn’t really bulb day, I got to thinking about how all those bulbs came to be in my mother’s possession. The sharing of bulbs was a community affair back then. I can’t count the times some neighbor or the other would come bearing bulbs wrapped in old newspapers, probably the Jackson County Sun. Sometimes it would be me trailing along behind Mommy, carrying a paper sack full of bulbs similarly wrapped to give to someone else.  It was common practice in the late fall and early spring for women in the county to share their bulbs.  

All of these deals were struck during front porch sessions throughout the year. Someone would come by and admire our flowerbeds or we would stop off at someone else’s house and sit a spell admiring theirs.  At some point the conversation would always turn to bulbs and seeds and who had what and who needed what. Someone would offer starts or seeds or bulbs when the season was right and a plan would be in place to trade a bit of this for a bit of that.  

Growing up, it seemed like everyone had big flowerbeds. Rows of canna lilies (Cannies) and dahlias, (Dallies) daffodils, tiger lilies and, daylilies sparkled on the hillsides about everywhere you would look. It occurred to me to wonder what it would look like if you could see a map of how all those flowerbeds were connected to each other, as so many of them were the result of swapping and sharing the bulbs and the seeds across the community. I didn’t think much of it at the time but these days, when such things don’t happen very often, it seems that something has been lost and it’s not just flower beds.  People shared more once upon a time. We shared food, water when someone’s well could dry up, flowers, vegetables, looking after younguns, labor to help get crops in or butcher a hog or two in the fall. People got together to break beans and shuck corn, put up tobacco, cut firewood; whatever needed doing. People shared the load of life and helped one another through it. If you stopped at someone’s house and they happened to be breaking beans at the time, you’d have a dishpan full of beans by your side and a dishtowel in your lap in no time. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to sit and string and break beans while the conversation moved from one topic to another, often coming around to flower beds and bulbs. 

People shared not just the symbols of their lives in the form of bulbs and seeds and such. People shared their lives in ways you just don’t see happening much anymore. Stories would be shared and advice given. Grief would be shared and, joy and hopes and fears for the future. Now, I was just a little child and spent most of that time listening but that felt like strength to me. It felt like connections that made everything work, everything bloom, everything grow.  I know now that those countless bulbs wrapped in old newspaper were much more than they appeared to be. They were echoes of the lives that grew them, fingerprints of the hands that dug and stored and shared them. They were symbols of a way of life that has faded and it’s more than nostalgia that makes me miss it. It is the understanding that that kind of sharing really is about the strength of a community and I have to wonder if we’ve lost some of our strength as we’ve lost so much of that sharing. 

I don’t have a lot of bulbs yet. I’m working on building my collection. But, if there is anybody out there who would like to revive that old tradition and has bulbs they want to share, I’d be open to receiving them and the stories attached. Maybe we can get back a little of what has been lost.