Labour Weekend. I’m planting potatoes. Main crop. I collect the tubers from where I laid them out to sprout towards the sun.

As I hoe a drill, it is my father’s hands I see, awkward hands, fingers crimped from an old car accident, hands that could never thread a needle or even hold the ends of a sheet for my mother to pull before ironing, stiff hands that seemed to need to be forced to wrestle the wires into an electric plug. But with potatoes it is different. There’s joy. His fingers lift each one with delicacy, turning it in his palm, minding each frail shoot. I watch as his hands place each seed in the dark soil, exactly right, settling it in. Then he rakes the soil over, softly, precisely, with calm sureness as a man might pull a blanket over a sleeping child. When the green pokes through it’s like a new morning.

At harvest time it’s a liturgy of marvels. Each shaw is lifted seriously, the hanging white globes shaken off. Then there’s the search for strays. The shovel slides in like a knife and is lifted. There’s a jiggle and a shimmy as the soil turns and tips, revealing potatoes hiding like nuggets. White and red ovals laid on the green lawn. My mother is called out from the house and comes with soapy hands to witness. They’ll see us through the winter. The man’s providing. There’s a sense of satisfaction, of completeness, bounty. My child’s eyes watch. My hands remember.

When he was dying, in the hours I sat with him, I asked my father about his childhood. Who was your mother’s favourite? “Ron.” And your father’s? A coy, boy’s smile: “Me. I did the garden with him.”

I picture them together, father and youngest son. It’s being passed on, how to provide, how to care. Lessons taken in as they dig together, examine tubers, handle small plants. The sun is shining on them both. The First World War’s going on, the boy too young, the man too old to fight.

My friend, half a generation older, speaks of her father. Back from the war, he won’t go to Mass any more. There’s a shadow over him. He’s seen too much. He’s down in the garden of a Sunday, rooting out, digging in, burying it all. But with potatoes it’s the same meticulous, observant rite.

Seventy years later she can see it still. “It was like a sacrament,” she says.

And she’s right. A man providing for his family. A man negotiating with soil and nature.

This year, as I rake the soft soil over, burying for resurrection, I wonder if he laid down the bodies of comrades in the mud, arranging their limbs, straightening a tunic, folding hands. For him there was no resurrection in those muddy fields. Their deadness sticks to him like clay. Back home he’s feeding the children, grown in his absence into these tall, incomprehensible girls. The potatoes anchor him to what it is to be a man, a husband, a father. Something’s the same. His sacrament is soil-bound, his resurrection in dark leaves emerging, his communion the white spuds on the round plates.

Author: Sandra Winton OP, a former teacher, is a pyschotherapist in Dunedin.