Liquid Gold

February, 2008
All rights reserved
By
Wendy Morrow

When I was 6 years old, spring in Calgary was a longed for event. After a winter of snow and dirty streets, short days and long nights, spring brings optimism. One day the ground is frozen solid and then almost the next day you can sink up to your ankles in the mud. The crocuses bloomed on the hill sides and the robins came back.
Like gophers popping out of their holes, gardeners emerged from their houses with their gloves on, balls of twine and seed packages in their pockets.
My mother was our gardener and she had prepared the ground in the previous fall, all the waiting vegetable beds needed now was a top dressing of compost and a gentle raking before she could plant the seeds.
My mother’s family had been gardeners going back to their very beginning. Her father was an avid rose gardener and a serious vegetable gardener as well. Her mother’s family were farmers of Irish extraction who lived in the country just north of Calgary. In the back soil of their farm’s massive vegetable patches, they grew everything they ate. They were not afraid to try anything new either. They would eat banana potatoes or purple carrots if they came from the garden. Their social lives were the big family gatherings that coincided with shelling peas and canning vegetables in the spring and harvest dinners and corn roasts in the fall.
Our little family had a fairly big city lot. Mum allowed only a small square of grass for us to play on and the rest of the back yard was devoted to the vegetable garden.
One spring day after the snow had melted from the garden plot, my father suggested to my mother that he could get a load of compost for her. He said that he could borrow a friend’s little flat bed trailer and hitch it to the back of our 1949 Chrysler sedan and bring home a load of gardener’s gold. “If you get manure make sure that it has been well composted.” Mum said. She didn’t want to be picking weeds out of her vegetable garden all summer. Everybody knew which one of our neighbours had put un-composted manure on their garden, you could smell it for blocks and the weed seeds were the first to sprout. “Righty-oh.” Dad said and went away whistling. I knew he wasn’t listening to her.
I felt quite privileged and very grown up when he asked me to come along with him. We drove to his friend’s place and after hitching up the little utility trailer, drinking several cups of coffee and long discussions with his mate about where to get the compost, off we went to the Calgary stock yards.
With money my father is a very careful man. He is extremely generous to his children but he could pinch a nickel so hard it would make the beaver squeak. He was shocked that the garden supply places would actually charge for what Dad considered to be just common ordinary dirt. His Scottish ancestry was too strong to over come, it wasn’t long before we ended up at the Calgary stock yards loading up the utility trailer with fresh manure.
Fresh manure is free, compost is pricey and Dad’s family weren’t farmers.
He loaded the runny muck onto the trailer. The solids remained in the trailer and the liquids spilled onto fenders and the tires and the road. As we drove away, I looked out the back window and watched the spray kick up behind us. The fumes were suffocating.
We drove home up the Edmonton Trail hill. This is one of the steepest roads in the city. The load in the trailer was heavy and as Dad put the car into 2nd gear and his foot on the gas, the trailer jumped off the hitch and hit the road. I screamed for Dad to stop, the trailer was going sideways. One little chain was the only connection that the trailer had to our car. The manure sloshed back and forth and settled to the front of the little trailer. The weight of the load dug the hitch cap into the pavement and prevented the whole works from snapping the chain and finding its own course down the hill. Dad put the hand brake on and got out of the car; he bent down and surveyed the damage.
He tried to lift the trailer back onto the hitch and couldn’t budge the thing. Cars passed us honking and pointing to the brown trail that was running down the centre of the road. With a wave Dad thanked them for their helpful observations.
When he is puzzled or worried my Dad holds his chin between his thumb and forefinger and twists his mouth from side to side. He leaned in the back window and sucking the air in between his teeth and out with a low slow whistle he said, “Well Deed, it looks like I have to go find some help. You stay here and I will be back in a jiffy.”
So, there I was on that lovely spring day with the temperature rising, sitting in the back seat of the car and a tipped over load of stinking fresh manure running down behind the little trailer with its nose buried in the road.

My swollen eyes were running and red and my nose plugged with the allergic reaction to the fresh manure. Wafts of the noxious fumes were filling the car. Even clogged up I could smell it. It was too warm outside to leave the windows up. This was the most embarrassed I had ever been. I sat there leaning out of the window with my head on my folded arms trying to catch any breath of air created when a car went by. I was out of tissues and my nose was running like a tap. It seemed like hours went by. People would stop their cars and walk up to ask me if we needed help. I got tired of telling them that my dad was going for help. I thought of abandoning the car and its manure load. I thought of walking home by myself all 15 blocks up hill. Finally Dad came back with a man to help him. Together they hoisted the trailer back on the hitch and we drove up the hill to home.
We shoveled the manure out onto the garden before my mother could catch on. Dad hosed out the trailer and returned it to his friend who was never able to use it for a domestic purpose again. For a couple of years the soil was too strong to grow anything in it without burning and the smell would drive us indoors on warm summer evenings, but it was fertile ground for the stories and the laughs I have shared with my father over the years.