45

I FOUND MY GRANDMOTHER in the garden, kneeling in the mud. She peeled off her decorative nails and placed them carefully on the porch next to her rings, while she busied herself with her plants. Now she cradled a deformed cucumber in her soil-browned gloves.

She looked down at the vegetable, then up at me, and spoke the words that began our nuclear arms race: “Next, I’m planting kohlrabi.”

My Grandmother had bequeathed unto me a small plot, five feet squared, at the edge of her garden, which I could neglect or tend as I saw fit. I had free rein of her tool shed and her fertilizers and she promised to provide me with seeds for each passing season. She pressed three seed packets into my hands that first crop, told me to take my pick: radishes, iceberg lettuce, wax beans.

“Plant your favorite.” She winked. “We’ll add it to the supper menu.”

So I opted for none of the above. Instead, I raided the sack of seed potatoes that she kept sitting in the shed. My thought process was myriad: french fries, potato chips, Thanksgiving day gravy volcanoes, or maybe just ammunition for a potato gun. What entertainment could wax beans offer me?

I buried the tubers twelve inches apart in holes six inches deep, not realizing that I was firing the first round.

My Grandmother was pleased to see me take to gardening, and soon we toiled side-by-side beneath the sweltering orange sun while she endeavored to gift me her green thumb. For weeks we watered, weeded, and talked together.

Then I murdered her cucumbers.

Potatoes, I hadn’t realized, need a more acidic soil to flourish. Cucumbers need basic soil. While cucumbers made fine bedfellows with the seeds my Grandmother had given me, they’d been poisoned by the neighbours I’d covertly introduced. Before too long, I harvested my fat, golden potatoes, while my Grandmother’s cucumbers remained pickle-sized and Frankensteinian.

The next spring, my Grandmother’s vengeance grew bulbous. I’d planted neat rows of peppers, while my Grandmother sprinkled her promised kohlrabi seeds into the cold earth. A few short weeks after germination, her first harvest was already underway and she planted another crop of kohlrabi, while I waited patiently to pick my vegetables in a couple months’ time.

My peppers never saw the summer. Sapped dry by the kohlrabi, my pepper plants grew stunted and barren. My Grandmother entered the house, soon after I uprooted my botched crop, and plunked her basketful of perennials on the table in front of me.

“Well.” She smiled. “At least one of us reaped what they sowed.”

It took two more failed crops of mine to realize that my Grandmother’s sabotage was intentional. Whenever she ventured out into our corner garden, clad in her sunhat, thick gloves, pair of sun-bleached jeans and long sleeves, she’d just put on her battle gear. And while we watered, weeded, and talked together, she was poisoning my plot of land. All for vengeance.

Well, two could play that game.

My revenge took the form of pumpkins. My Grandmother tried to coyly coax my crop out of her, but I lied and said it was carrots. I’d purchased a packet of jack o’ lantern seeds with my allowance money and planted them while she grocery shopped. Sensing that I’d guessed her plan, my Grandmother shored up with spinach—every crop’s best friend. Or so she thought.

My pumpkins swelled. They consumed my patch of earth. Then they laid siege to the 2x4s that contained my tiny plot. Then they began to creep their greedy fingers into her garden.

I watered daily, fertilized weekly, and coaxed my plants on with tales of revenge and stories about their soft and fragile neighbours, the rich soil that would be the spoils of war. With every passing week, my vines inched inexorably onward. Soon, it was not only my immediate neighbours who felt my ire, but their neighbours as well. The vines stretched ten feet, then twenty. My pumpkins engulfed her spinach, her peas, and began to sneak up on the flower garden too.

Come harvest, my Grandmother looked out at the mess of vines and laughed long and heartily. The broad green leaves and ballooning orange fruit had buried her vegetables completely.

“I yield,” she chuckled. “Now. What are we going to do with your bloody pumpkin apocalypse?”

That Thanksgiving, my Grandmother toasted any feud both brutal and bloodless. Over our mashed potato volcanoes and pumpkin pie, we discussed strategies to continue our war once the frost thawed.