My grandmother Rhoda Straus planted a garden every year all her life, until her osteoporosis became so bad that she literally could not crawl through the black earth any more.

She lived her whole life in or near Fergus Falls, Minn. Until some time well after World War II, her life was a very hard one. A faraway accountant just looking at the figures would have called it poverty.

If there was plenty of food (and not much else), it was because Grandma gave a significant portion of her life energy to food production - milking cows, feeding steers, separating cream, churning butter, baking bread and pies, canning, freezing, drying, and curing cottage cheese on the stovetop.

Not to mention driving the grain truck. She baked bread twice a week from the age of 8 to 92.

That toast was the best toast I ever ate.

She saved every plastic bag she ever got her hands on, from the day when the newfangled first plastic bag appeared in northwestern Minnesota in the 1940s to the last few years when it no longer mattered.

The moment any plastic bag had served its primary purpose, however firm or flimsy its construction, she smoothed it out on the counter with her strong calloused hands, folded it twice as if it were agricultural origami, and placed it like lace in a drawer in her kitchen.

In those early years, the bags were clunky. When you pulled one out to put a sandwich in it, decades later, you'd see the fault lines of its construction, and the accumulated mottling from use after use after use.

When Grandma died in 1993, my parents and I converged on the farm to clean out the house. My mother, who left the farm, went to college and never looked back, not once, opened that drawer, made a little sound of appreciative disgust and dumped her mother's lifetime plastic bag collection unceremoniously into the trash. How Rhoda would have clucked at that.

Grandma's left thumb was pitted and grooved like an Edison recording cylinder or an old cutting board - which is precisely what it was.

I don't suppose there is any way of knowing how many potatoes she peeled in the course of her life, but I think "infinite" is the correct technical term. I have her favorite knife. It has been sharpened countless times over 60 or 70 years (though never by me) until it's literally about half the size it was at the time of its purchase. It's curved like a scythe from the way Grandpa honed it.

I used it yesterday to cut up seed potatoes. When the dull edge slashed through the first potato to my uncalloused, consumerist thumb, whose principal encounters are with the space bar on my laptop, a wave of pride and an inrush of sorrow passed through me into the black soil of my garden where I sat. A meadowlark sang its liquid song like Chanticleer, just over in the prairie grass.

Some very large part of me believes we have lost more than we have gained.

She made patchwork quilts all her life, from remnants of cloth left over from sewing projects. You could, if you wished, "read" one of her quilts: that one's the shirt she made for Grandpa the year the cultivator fell on his leg; that's my sister's nightgown for her fifth birthday; that's the drapes that still hang in the dining room; that's the year her church circle went nutzoid over cowboy kerchief throw pillows; that's that sky blue corduroy jumper you can see in the family studio portrait from 1968, when rural Minnesota was time immemorial and the rest of the world was coming apart at the seams.

In my 20s, I made half a dozen quilts at the farm, with Grandma's advice and consent. It was like working with an inscrutable Zen master. It always felt as if she might suddenly thwack me with a stick for a dropped stitch, or blindfold me and say, "Tie the yarn with your heart, not your fingers, grasshopper."

Because I had no heritage basket of fabric scraps, I bought a yard of this and a yard of that to make a special quilt as a wedding gift. When we set up the card table in the living room of the old farmhouse and I pulled out those gleaming, unscathed yards of cloth, Grandma looked at me in disappointment and a hint of contempt. I could hear her thinking, "You may be intelligent but you are not very smart, are you?"

When I was studying in England, she used to send me journal letters on crinkly onionskin paper (to save on postage), 500 words one day on the hail damage from the big thunderstorm, 100 words three days later on the good sermon at church.

Her beautiful penmanship (the Palmer method), in several colors of ink on the same page, flowed through gift pens from the grain co-op or the veterinary clinic or insurance adjuster.

I remember one evening opening a lean airmail envelope with four sheets of onionskin in it. The first line read. "Today I put up 42 apple pies." I thought: "Great, I read act two of King Lear and spent three hours with my friend Douglas in a coffee shop."

A life radically misspent.

When I moved into my house here, the first thing I did was hang a photograph of Grandma on the wall leading into my kitchen, carefully positioned so that I would see it every single day.

The snapshot was taken in 1980. She is standing behind a large wooden picnic table on the worn concrete slab that jutted out from the one-story farmhouse. The table is covered with ripe tomatoes - every square inch, every square millimeter from tip to tip in both directions. The red tomatoes are so neatly nested against each other that to add a single cherry tomato would require starting a second tier. She stands behind that part of her tomato crop in a thin faded cotton farm dress.

My grandmother didn't like being photographed, and she understood from her scarred thumb to her work-weakened knees that pride goeth before the fall. But if you look carefully, there is a glorious, unmistakable, though barely perceptible, intimation of smugness in that portrait.

You could say that I plant a garden, now that I have returned to the heartland, in Grandma's honor, but that would not be quite accurate. I plant a garden because the almost buried, nearly spent, barely glowing ember in me that is Rhoda Straus' grandchild is the best of me by far.

Thwack.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at BSC and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)