MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT​
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​​NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Mentor Commentary
Nardine Taleb

Recipient Reflection
​​Joanne Lozar Glenn

What He Planted

Nonfiction by ​​Joanne Lozar Glenn

One summer, I snapped a picture of my father watering the crops at dusk, the garden hose looping like a snake in his hands. He raked, then troweled, vegetable beds, planting lettuce seeds, tomato seedlings, corn, rhubarb, cukes. Grape vines. And marigolds. Their noxious odor saved crops from critters. He heard me coming, looked up, smiled as if he was glad to see me. Unlike me, he never hid his love. I, on the other hand, split off flakes of mine, of my life, too, as if from a too-long idle, rusty tool. I'd been left too many times to be that open.
 
Is that true? Or is it just an excuse for the miserly way I hide pieces of myself from view? Myself as the young teacher dancing barefoot on the sticky floor of the bar in the Flats after watching Lake Erie swallow the sun’s reflection as night shuttered day. The first-time bride waiting for a guest who skipped the wedding, delaying its start. The second go-round, daring to hope, bopping to some rhythm only she hears while flossing in front of the bathroom mirror. A decade later, filing away the wreckage like raw footage from a crime scene: wedding dress in the trash, for sale sign on the front lawn.
 
My father didn't live long enough to see all the iterations of the child he'd been so ecstatic to welcome into the world—his first. Still he loved: me, the four who came after, the wife who was sick off and on for the more than 40 years of their marriage. He knew he was dying. He asked only one thing: that my mother live with one of us.
 
The Memorial Day before he passed, we gathered in the yard between the lilac bushes and the plum tree, circled lawn chairs so we could see and hear what he wanted to say. He doted in words--I’ve got the best damn kids and the best damn wife in the world—and in practical gifts. Hedge trimmers to my then-husband and me. The well-used rakes and trowels. The gas grill where he’d cooked so many steaks, roasted so much corn, chicken, beer-basted beef.
 
I keep the image I snapped on my bookshelf, near the one of my mother in her wheelchair and the one from that earlier time when she is sitting in his lap, her arm draped around his shoulder, his face in profile, his cheek lifted in a smile. It was an assignment for a photography class: Shoot the subject in a way that shows something important. Not just a photo. A portrait. And so it was, that one of him watering the garden—my favorite—ensuring that what he planted would grow.

Joanne Lozar Glenn

Joanne Lozar Glenn works as a freelance writer and editor, teaches writing in adult education programs, and leads destination writing retreats. Her writing been published in Brevity, Beautiful Things (River Teeth), Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, The Northern Virginia Review, Peregrine, Under the Gum Tree, and other print and online media. Her most recent book, co-authored with five writers, was Memoir Your Way: Tell Your Story Through Writing, Recipes, Quilts, Graphic Novels, and More (Skyhorse Publishing, 2016), and her craft essay on getting and giving more helpful writing feedback was anthologized in Getting to the Truth (Hippocampus Press, 2021).