her able hands

I’m amazed by how much I can accomplish when I have time, energy, focus and someone else to run interference with the kids. My intention yesterday was to leave work at 4:00 because I worked through lunch, but somehow I still ended up shutting the computer down at 5:00.

Driving home with the windows open, I sail through pockets of Lilac fragrance so intense, it’s as if I’m driving through a boudoir moments after a proper lady sprayed her atomizer. Beautiful. Lilac bloom almost always coincides with my birthday and mother’s day and is my favorite flower scent by far. I would like to plant a Lilac hedge along the open area of the back yard between our plot and the development behind us, leaving an opening for the kids to dash through, of course.

At home, Fatou (the girl who lives out back) joins us on the deck for potato chips and dip, apple slices and juice. Then I set the girls up with chalk, sponges and buckets of water in front of the chalk board. I sort through seeds at the picnic table until Chris gets home from his guitar lesson. I notice that the air smells exactly the way it did the week we moved in, it feels right, I feel connected. I look up and see Fatou’s mother and grandmother making their way across the grass with the bowls and the soup pot from the weekend meal I made for their family to welcome the new baby girl.

Inside one bowl is a steaming mound of Japanese sticky rice, in the pot a thick stew of beef and vegetable curry. It smells incredible and I try not to tear up, but my gratitude is so thick, it chokes me. I have just been sitting with my seeds and wondering if I can get away with not feeding my family a real dinner so I can plant. I tell them, “This is too much. Thank you, you have given me my evening.”

Chris pulls the girls around the yard in the wagon, their screams sound just like my own summers as a child at Lincoln Park, riding the kiddie roller coaster, screeching my curly head off, my face splitting in a smile of joy and terror so wide I can hardly keep it with me.

At least one month late, I get ready to plant, hoping that the partial shade will give the greens half a chance.

As I pull the soil back with my trowel, then sprinkle seed with my thumb and forefinger, my mind slips away from the task and begins to chew on the problem of research and how to do it. I want to write more about the food supply and how big agribusiness is making the world and its people sick, driving out small farms and destroying what little food security local systems might be able to provide in an emergency. My little seeds are my personal rebellion against the tide, but the tidal wave is building and we the people, we have to do something to stop it. I think my first step is reading. My second step is talking to people who are in it, living with the system affecting their livelihoods. Then writing. But who, what, where? When? There’s so little time.

Someone said to me recently, “So if you don’t have enough time to do what’s important to you, quit your job.” Fair enough. But not very practical, at least until we don’t have two mortgages. Someone else said, “So free up your free time, skip the garden this year.” Not a chance. I can’t imagine a life without a garden. Wait, that’s not entirely true. I can imagine, I can remember a life without a garden. I remember four years living in a fourth-floor walk-up overlooking acres of onion fields and the closest thing I had to a garden was the Philodendron plant that snaked a full circle around the wall like a border. I ached to get out there and stick my hands in the black dirt.

But I also ache to get out there and stick my hands in the bigger story, to learn how to listen. My little piece of it? That’s my reflection. I’m ready to hold that up to the giant mirror of the world, I just need to figure out where to begin. Do I head down to the farmer’s market and start with a single question, then stop telling my story, just listen? Most of the people set up down there are part-time farmer/gardeners, not quite hobbyists, but not full-scale either. I’m thinking back to my past conversations with the folks down there, and realizing that I seldom listened, that I yammered on about my own bla, bla, bla. Here I am! This is me! Isn’t it grand?!

It dawned on me that I may never move beyond writing this blog if I don’t practice closing my mouth and opening my ears and mind. I re-read some essays I’ve written and can see why the rejection slips piled up—they’re too ego-centric. They lack connection to the world. They are only framed within the space of my own heart and mind. The language might work, but a diary is useful to others probably only after the author is dead and gone.

I finish tamping down the soil on the last row of seeds and add the notations to my sketch. If they germinate, the effect will be one of alternating stripes and blocks, with colors ranging from pale to dark green, pink to red.

Fennel
Arugula
Merlot Lettuce
Oak Leaf Lettuce
Rouge D’hiver Lettuce
Giant Thick Leaf Spinach
Pink Chard
Viroflay Spinach
Broccoli Raab
Full-Heart Batavian Endive
Mesclun
Something Something Du Diable Lettuce
Lolla Rosa Lettuce
Nero De Toscana Kale
Bloomsdale Spinach

Here on my lower back, a Cherokee tattoo artist inked a continuous wave, a reminder to myself to stay in the flow of life. I wish I had put it on my hand so I could see it every day.

Life sure does flow with its own tide, a constantly shifting, wave-building tide. So good to stop struggling to swim against it, instead sinking back with lungs full of air and letting it carry me to wherever I should be going.

Still, I’ll hope for rain.

Technorati Tags: writing, narrative nonfiction, gardening, seeds, salad greens, neighborhood, eat local

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