The Husband Carried the Harvest in Sacks to His Sister for 7 Years: I Planted Flowers in the Field
The Husband Carried the Harvest in Sacks to His Sister for 7 Years: I Planted Flowers in the Field
I bought twenty packets of flower seeds at a hardware superstore, simply grabbing whatever I found in front of me on the shelf—marigolds, zinnias, lavateras, narcissi—and right there at the checkout, I realized something had broken inside my life. Before that, I had never bought flowers for the dacha.
Only potatoes—thirty kilos of seeds at a time, only onions in buckets, only zucchini and pumpkins, which didn’t hold up in the cellar anyway and rotted by October. And now I was standing with these bright little packets, and the cashier, a woman about my age, asked me: “Is the garden big?” I nodded affirmatively. “Twenty acres” (approx. or ares). She whistled through her teeth and added that I would also need lawn grass seeds if I intended to sow all of that properly. I went back to the sales floor and picked up a five-kilogram bag of lawn mix.
Inside the car, an old sedan we had bought with my husband before he retired, I sat for about ten minutes without starting the engine, looking at the white packets scattered across the passenger seat.
It was early May, the air had warmed up, the asphalt in the parking lot already smelled of dust and hot rubber, and I realized that in three days my husband would start loading buckets and shovels into the trunk. Just like always. Because the dacha, in his view, was not a place of rest, but a food supply base for his entire clan.
I worked as an economist in the municipal housing and urban infrastructure department for almost thirty years. Numbers, budgets, acts, claims. At the plot, I rested from the office only the first two years after buying it. Then the following began: my husband decided that since he had land, he was obligated to feed everyone.
His sister and her husband, his cousin, the nephews, and even some distant relatives from the regional center whom I saw at most twice in my life—everyone received nets of potato sacks, boxes of onions, and jars of pickles in the autumn. I couldn’t take it anymore.
After a week of work, on Friday evening, we would leave for the dacha, and until Sunday evening, my back wouldn’t straighten. Weeding, planting, watering with the hose that always kinked, fighting the potato bug, gathering larvae by hand because my husband didn’t trust chemicals. I went to bed with a buzzing back, and on Monday I got out of bed with difficulty, as if I had worked two consecutive shifts.
My husband, Viktor Semyonovich, never said I worked poorly. He simply hauled all the produce off to the relatives, and that was considered the norm. “We have land, we must share,” he repeated, and there wasn’t a trace of doubt in his voice. He grew up in a village, in a large family where the common garden fed everyone, and he genuinely believed he was doing the right thing.
He wasn’t stingy; on the contrary, he was generous, only for some reason this generosity was always at the expense of my spine. I tried talking to him about it twice. The first time he simply brushed it off: “Fresh air does you good.” The second time he got angry: “What, are you against my family?” I fell silent. For a very long time. Seven years.
This spring everything changed, not suddenly. It’s just that by March, my arthritis had flared up—the joints in my fingers swelled up by evening to the point where I couldn’t zip up my boots. The doctor at the regional clinic said: “You should reduce the load, fine motor skills are suffering.” I nodded and thought: fine motor skills are precisely sorting out potato tubers before planting, cutting them at their eyes, planting them in holes.
Four days just for planting. Two thousand holes. I had counted. Generally, I like counting. Twenty acres, of which eighteen were under potatoes. Ten acres under early ones, eight under late ones. The harvest—about six hundred kilos in a good year. Out of those, two hundred and fifty went to my husband’s sister, Galina Petrovna, another one hundred and twenty to his brother in the regional center, seventy to the niece for the winter, and the rest were brought down to the cellar and then eaten until February, until the remnants started sprouting.
In late March, I sat at the kitchen table, took out my calculator and the old checkered notebook where I usually recorded dacha expenses. In the left column, I wrote down everyone who took potatoes, and on the right—the approximate weight. It turned out that every year I grew almost four hundred kilos for strangers. People who didn’t come even once to help with the weeding. Even a “thank you” on the phone was said once in a blue moon. Galya could call and say: “This year your potatoes are a bit small, last year’s were better.” I would stay silent into the receiver because my husband was standing nearby looking at me with the expression “don’t you dare answer rudely.”
And so in April, I looked at this notebook and realized—I can’t do this anymore. Not in the sense of being “angry,” but physically I can’t. My back wouldn’t bend, my hands hurt, my blood pressure went up. I am sixty-one years old. I’ve been retired for three years, but essentially I haven’t rested for a single summer. My dacha is twenty acres of forced labor fenced in with barbed wire. I never even planted roses because my husband thought flowers were a useless waste of land.
The plan matured by mid-April. I didn’t consult anyone because the advisors in my circle were precisely two: my husband and his sister, and I knew their opinion in advance. I simply called the local nursery, run by a family from the neighboring village, and ordered perennial plants: phloxes, peonies, hostas, daylilies, astilbes—everything that doesn’t require annual plowing and lives in the same place for ten years. The girl on the other end of the line, who introduced herself as Valeria, clarified: “In what quantity?” I mentioned the number of forty roots. She fell silent and asked again: “Are you starting a nursery?” I answered: “No, I am starting my life.”
Then came the hardest part: bringing all this to the dacha so that my husband wouldn’t notice ahead of time. He had gone to the regional center to his brother’s place for three days in late April—to help with repairing the veranda. I asked the dacha neighbor, Stepan, with whom we exchanged a few words across the fence, to help with the unloading. Stepan is a silent guy, a former bus driver, who did a few private trips in retirement and had an old canvas-covered Gazel. I paid him for the delivery, and within a day we brought and unloaded all forty pots of perennials. I hid them behind the old greenhouse, covered them with spunbond, and weighed them down with bricks. It looked like a pile of construction
The continuation is in the first c0mment
