Cindy,

This may sound like something out of Hansel and Gretel, but there is a very
elderly woman who lives in Miller
County, Arkansas... if only she is still living alone up there.

Friend David (from Lafayette, Louisiana) and I like backpacking and,
normally, go to the mountains, but were
scouting for hiking places and were on a dirt road in the hill forest
country when we saw her sitting in the cab of an old abandoned wrecked
automobile, with no doors, as if waiting for someone to come along. We
stopped to ask her if she needed assistance and saw a double barrel shotgun
laying across her lap. She said, no, she was just waiting for the mailman to
deliver her monthly SS check to her mailbox, and had the shotgun because her
check had been stolen the month before. (Whew !)

She was at least eighty -- eighty-five, maybe.

At that moment, the mailman drove up to her box and put mail in it and went
on. She unloaded the shotgun and went and got the mail out of the box and
then said that as a matter of fact she did need some assistance with
something. Her hand rail on the steps of her cabin had broken and she had
fallen a few days earlier. She showed us a badly
bruised and swollen knee and elbow. So we with her down that narrow
driveway, jumping water-filled mud holes and
climbing over a couple of fallen trees -- looking at each other wondering
what the heck we had gotten ourselves into.

Her old cabin looked like something out of the 1800s. I am not making this
up. It had a rusted tin roof, was heated by a wood stove, had a shallow
well outside. And the forest looked as if it were trying to close in around
it. She literally was living the way people did a hundred years ago.

But (you MUST have been wondering where I was going with all this), she had
a garden you would not believe.

Turns out she had been widowed decades ago, had two grown sons -- one who
lived in Vivian, La. and had been trying to get her to come and live with
him and his wife for years, and another who lives in California who writes
to her maybe twice a year.

Her hand rail was rotted and was broken and I told her I had some treated
lumber at my fishing camp down on
Black Bayou Lake and we would come back the next day and rebuild the
handrail and her front steps, too.

David and I used to stop by and check on her when we passed through on the
way to hiking trails. We called her (fondly, I promise you) "the witch."
She was anything but witchy.

But we haven't been up that way in a couple of years now.

Garden... garden... this is about garden. It was not rectangular but,
rather, went out into the woods like the spokes of a wheel. More than once,
I stopped by there and repaired something for her (leaks in the roof I
sealed with roofing
compound, rusted out stove pipe once, put a new rope on the well
pulley...etc.)

But she always paid with something out of her garden. And one of the things
she had in that garden was tom'atoes.

She grows castor trees for shade over her yard. They get HUGE ! (They are
deadly poison, so not many people raise them nowadays.)

I'm almost scared to go up there and find that cabin vacant... but I've just
put it on my do-list to go and check on her in the next week or two...
hoping she is okay... and, also, hoping she has some tom'ato seeds.

Gosh ! I didn't mean to write a book here.

One way or another, I'll find some seeds or some sets. Most likely, if I
find some, they will be in some old timer's garden up in that part of the
country.

Will let you know.

g



"Cindy" wrote in message
. ..
I'm sorry I can't help you with this, but if you find some seed, please
let us know, because I'd like some too.

Cindy