Garden

On Sunday, my grandmother, great-aunt, dad, and I went to my grandmother's plot of land in Gwangju, about an hour east of Seoul. On terraces cut into the side of a mountill (somewhere between a mountain and a hill), my great-aunt had laid out rows of potato seedlings and covered them with black plastic to protect them from weeds. Some of the plastic had worked out of the loose dirt holding their edges down, and flapped in the cool breeze. A couple of other people were working on their plots when we arrived, but left for lunch; I think they were perhaps my grandmother's nieces and nephews, but I'm not sure.

I had originally made plans to see Throne of Blood, one of the films showing at the Akira Kurasawa festival in town, on Sunday, but my friend felt her eyes weren't up to it after undergoing Lasik surgery on Friday. So instead of seeing the Japanese version of Macbeth, I found myself eating sizzling pieces of just-fried pork and beef in a plastic-encased greenhouse, wrapping the pieces in lettuce that was growing right beside me.

My grandmother and great-aunt are old school in the way they prepare food -- they buy a lot of stuff from the market, of course, but they also grow their own potatoes and greens, as well as tramp through mountill sides for things like chestnuts, peanuts and acorns. They make their own noodles and rice cakes from scratch. Incredible. And sad too, to think that that knowledge will be lost when these two old women and the thousands of other old-schoolers like them pass away.

About 20 minutes after we got there, I caught the sight of my dad carrying an armload of gardening implements on his shoulder: shovel, pick-axe, rake, and a couple things I don't even know the names for. In the grown-up version of playing in the dirt, we set out to dig a large stone out of an unplanted section of the garden.

It was very, very large, though. Much larger than we thought.

So instead, we took the loose dirt and spread it around, tossing aside numerous rocks. By the time we finished creating a neat row like my great-aunt's potato seedlings, my hands, pants, arms, and probably hair were covered with dirt.

Great fun. And hard work. Now I know why some very old men and women here walk the way they do, bent over with their backs nearly horizontal to the ground: a lifetime of hunching over potato seedlings will do that to you.