“We always put manure on our garden and we never had any bugs, but now they’ve got all those fancy fertilizers. You just watch they’ll be coming back to our ways.” Her voice had a ring of independence. She knew what she was talking about. She was a farmer and a hard worker. I would come upon her in the garden — her short sturdy figure bent over vegetables or stooped picking strawberries in the  hot morning sun. She wore a cotton-checked dress and a big straw hat that covered her freckled face and milky white shoulders. Only her hands, stained by the earth, were weathered. ” I always put a potato in my…