Bucketful of Ladybugs
I remember Dad releasing ladybugs, hundreds of them, to kill aphids. That moment is sticky, and I can play it over and over in my memory. It's my favorite garden story, a bucketful of ladybugs released in a buzz of red and black. Sometime in Indiana, he taught me all the names of the weeds and the bugs. He loved the land, and he made me love it too. There is a picture of when I was five years old. I am riding a kid's tractor-trike in one of the earliest photos of Jeff and me - no unicorn trike, pink, or girlishness. It is a tractor – something to till the soil, connect to the ground, and make roots. Place. A sense of place. That is what he gifted me.
