Ashamed

When I was a budding fourteen,  my grandfather did the most embarrassing thing.  He dug up our backyard and planted mustard greens from the back porch to the alley.  Across the street from the home where he lived, there was one of those community centers where they handed out the free cheese, butter and powdered eggs.  In the cool of the morning, you could see the glistening faces waiting patiently for blocks of cheese aged by neglect and grade B butter dyed yellow.  They also handed out dried goods and I do mean dried goods.  Half of my hometown came out to get that old food and they were happy.  My grandfather was born in 1922.  He was a boy turning teen when the depression took hold of America.  I am told that they survived by hunting in the woods and growing their own food.  My grandfather had no shame in his green patch.  When times got hard, he bought a package of bacon and picked himself a pot of greens.  It was like seeing two worlds.  In one world, poverty was an advantage.  In the other world, poverty was fought like Goliath.  My great aunts and uncles would do just about anything to keep their heads above water and out of the soup line.  When I think of the jobs they held just to keep the family farm afloat, I am ashamed, not of them, but of us.  I have never chopped sugarcane.  I have never picked cotton.  I have never made a pot of soup out of a pig's tail and I have never made hog's head cheese.  These are skills that my grandfather had just to survive.  To think, I was ashamed of that green patch.  Over the years, I can remember a lot of people getting a pot of greens from the greens patch.  My grandfather always told the people to pinch the leaves off so that more would grow.  He did not just feed himself, he fed his community, and I was ashamed.