It has cooled down substantially. There have been morning fogs and evening breezes. It’s still very humid and the smoke is still hazing the hills, making mountains insubstantial, mere ideas of solidity squatting across the river valley. It is also raining most days, but lightly, not torrents (except for the storm cell that dropped more than two inches of rain in 40 minutes yesterday and flattened the herb bed). Mostly it’s been the kind of drizzling mist that can carry on for hours and never add more than a fingernail of precipitation to the garden’s rain gauge. Miserable weather for the cucurbits who strive to keep their broad, hairy leaves dry, free from fungi and microbial blooms. But I rather appreciate it.
Working in the garden is much less onerous when the sun isn’t boiling this humid air, turning the valley into a stewpot. If I’m going to be damp in any case, as the weather in Vermont seems to newly insist upon in the growing season, I prefer working in air temperatures below that of my body. It’s much less likely to result in an overpriced trip to the emergency room for heat stroke, for one thing, but it’s also enjoyable — which is the main reason I am a gardener.
I grew into this habit as a young child because the garden was where I found contentment. Digging and planting, pruning and harvesting, watching all the other beings live their inscrutable lives, helping to nourish small patches of vibrancy, cultivating life in all its fascinating color and variation. I was endlessly surprised by success at this trifling endeavor. A pint of succulent strawberries from what looked like lifeless, dried worms when I put the transplants in the ground, and all I had to do was keep the soil moist and the shade of other leaves at bay. In other words, I didn’t do very much to be rewarded with sheer delight — from planting to spreading fragrant straw to eating delicious berries for breakfast. Usually served with biscuits and cream.
Which came from my other joy — turning whatever came out of the garden or the farm stand into delectable nourishment. As a youngster, I would watch my grandmother and lend a hand when she accepted the inexpert assistance. She could take a confusing pile of produce and raw meat and, seemingly with very little effort or intention, whip it into amazing food — that she also invariably plated in elegant style, even when serving up daily sustenance. No meal was ever unappreciated or quotidian. Every detail was savored and celebrated, from her intricate use of spices and herbs to the china and table linens she set out — always shining and pressed, with many of the cloths and napkins also made by her hands. She was magical to me. I wanted to be just like her.
As an awkward teenager in a community that named me strange, unacceptably foreign, I found companionship and approval in the garden, joy and confirmation in the kitchen. That is to say, I found the meaning of life. In the summer’s heat (which was never as hot as a moderate day now), I would take my notebooks out to the veg patch and write the thoughts and draw the wordless emotions that burbled to the surface while I puttered around, pulling weeds and dead-heading the flowers. I talked to the insects and spiders and plants, probably solidifying my reputation as a weirdo hippy kid to any who saw me out there. But few did. The garden was backed by a half acre of woods on one side, a tall forsythia hedge on the other, and the compost pit that my father had dug — which grew a lovely peach tree in a surprisingly short time. Beyond the compost was an empty field that seemed to belong to nobody and everybody, because there were still patches of unclaimed land in those days and also because it was mostly inaccessible to development. It was full of butterflies and iridescent dragonflies. It was the best place to fly kites, which was another favorite pastime of mine.
(From the image on Google maps, I learned that this field is not a flowery meadow these days. It seems to have spent some time as a sports pitch in the intervening decades, but now it is just a mown, barren rectangle on the edge of a parking lot for a funeral home. And my veg garden now houses a large plastic pool… I’m pretty sure there is a metaphor in all that…)
In retrospect, I now see that I missed out on the normal and normalizing socialization that comes from spending the teenage years in search of popular approval. I was a solitary kid and avoided being around other humans, people my age most of all. Even when I was among peers, I tended to be in my own world, which included the trees and the cornfields and the myriad other lives that passed unnoticed though in plain sight of the people around me. With a few notable exceptions, being around teenagers was disorienting for me. I drifted to the edges and escaped as soon as I could.
I was frequently alone, but I was never lonely. I would ride my bike off to my grandfather’s river-bottom farm, passing whole afternoons just watching the corn grow and the clouds drift overhead. I was in the company of muskrats and turtles, frogs and herons, stag beetles and bees, all going about their fascinating lives, all teaching me how to live. But I learned most from the plants. I mapped out the soil, noting where the corn was stunted by damp roots, learning the weeds and what they said about nutrients and structure. Dock and goldenrod sprouted in the boggy soils. Crabgrass and dandelions and plantains all withstood the depleted and compacted soil in tractor wheel wells. The chenopods only grew in the richest, most friable loam, though I have since learned that, left unchecked, they quickly drain the soil, turning all that nutrition into thousands of massive plants, each bearing a bazillion seeds. Lamb’s quarters are a sign of great soil, as long as you don’t allow them to live.
Which was another lesson I learned. There is always a cost to eating, though I have come to call it a balance — this life for that — and there are plenty of lives that are incompatible with eating from my garden. I’m not much of a garden romantic and feel perfectly justified in pulling the weeds and squishing the squash bugs. But I also don’t have many illusions about control. It’s the garden that grows, largely on its own whims. Same in the kitchen. The bread will rise… or it won’t. My efforts create the possibility of bread, the right conditions for microbes to live their lives and, coincidentally, grow dough. I just add heat at the end of those lives. And that is the most important lesson. All these lives end so that others can begin. Life is a continual sine wave, a spiral, always echoing what comes before and prefiguring what is to come, but never the same moment twice. Life is music, swelling here, decaying there, but always seeking out harmony.
This is how I know that the world will be just fine. Very likely humans will be just fine as well. However, the decided minority who don’t know how to harmonize will not be fine… But they really never have been. From my perspective, the view from the garden, they appear to be deeply unhappy, never content, never well, never understanding what these lives are about. They don’t participate in life. They demand. I think the kids who named me a strange loner are probably adults who never escape their loneliness. Nor do they ever learn to enjoy this world. It is sad. But it does seem to be ending, as all things do eventually.
This culture does not honor the cycles of life for life. There is no reciprocity, always taking, never giving back, and that is simply unsustainable. It has only lasted as long as it has because it is so blind and stupid that it does not refrain from eating its own future. I will not be sorry to see the end of this egocentric way of being, though it will not be a clean or natural death. This culture will suffer a horrible ending, and that is frightening and sad because it did not have to be this way, because it still doesn’t — and yet it undoubtedly will.
But there has been suffering all along. This culture is built on suffering. That is what extraction grows. Grabbing all the life for the self creates mass suffering, not only for those who are deprived but for the self that is thus cut off and isolated from all other lives, indeed, from any reason to be alive. So I am heartbroken that so many people who shared my childhood, who work with me now, who I know and love are not likely to thrive as this culture ends — most of them after a lifetime of unhappiness. When all they had to do was give back to the land a little, to not take so much, to notice and celebrate lives rather than use and desecrate this world. The Earth does not ask any of its creatures for much, nothing save to respect the balance. And yet I know so many who seem impervious to that simple lesson, and so they suffer.
I hope that more people in this culture might find their way to the wisdom and good cheer of the garden and the kitchen. I write about the pleasure this path provides. I share with those around me the bounty in my life, hoping to inspire others to join me. I hope, but I don’t hope too much. There are too many obstacles, too many insistent voices compelling them to remain on their present course. Besides, people don’t change until they need to, and we’re not to that extremity yet. (Give it a couple more summers…)
Still, I could not be a gardener if I did not believe in the future. Gathering the harvest makes no sense except in the context of continuity. Merely setting the table for my daily supper requires the belief that things will be well. These small acts of defiant hope make up a path to both comfort and that harmonious connection with all around me. This is how to live well. This is the easiest path to contentment. And I can’t help but think that as things fall apart, more people will stumble upon this wisdom out of sheer necessity, to then be captivated by the life they will find there.
But… I have to admit that hope is not why I garden nor why I cook. Not really. I do these things because they make me happy. I spend all my free moments in the garden and the kitchen because I know no greater pleasure, and I am a sybaritic little monkey just like every other human, just like every other living being. This is my happy place.
There are so many happy places in the world, so many ways to be in happy harmony with the world, so much amicability and consonance — and only one small, sad corner of humanity living in discord. Indeed, just two generations ago, doing your part to make happiness, cultivating joy alongside the skills necessary to provide for yourself, living well on whatever was abundant where you lived, this was normal even in this imperial country. This was the way everyone lived. My magical grandmother did not learn to cook and craft in order to make the best of meagre means. My grandmother was wealthy. But as recently as my grandmother’s generation it was customary, the done thing for everyone to know how to do things and to do them regularly enough to be able to do them well. The pervasive disconnection from good living found in this culture — and only in this culture — has very shallow roots. And I find that hopeful as well.
Maybe the seduction of good food will draw people out of their miserable lives. Maybe the community of the garden, the welcoming acceptance, the connection will break the egotistical curse laid on my country. Maybe more people will discover the ease of working just a little to produce all that is needed — and then wonder why they ever agreed to be a part of this most unsatisfactory culture of constant labor wasted on nothing at all. Maybe more sybaritic little monkeys will find their happy place, the place where all is right with the world. Or maybe it will all fall apart and only the gardeners will be left standing.
I couldn’t say what the future holds, but I am certain that it will be more like the past than the present. Because time echoes, but also because this culture doesn’t work. So this grasping abnormality will end. Being a gardener, being directly engaged with the world, crafting life in harmony with the world, that will be normal. And I suspect the world will be a happier place. Regardless of the weather…
©Elizabeth Anker 2024
