I drove
a tractor today. I loaded hay and delivered fifty-five gallon drums of water
across red Georgia clay to seedlings recently planted.
Nobody taught me that what we did
when growing up—my father a salesman and my mother a stay-at-home in the city
of Cedar Falls, Iowa—was any better than the cousins we never saw, the ones who
spent their childhoods raising pigs and growing the biggest ear of corn they
could in order to impress whoever was in charge of the future farmers of
America. The FFA had their sticker stamped on each and every Iowa Hawkeye
football helmet. I’m not sure what I thought of that or if I even thought of it
at all.
It hurts for me to realize that day
after day after my grandma’s death I grow to appreciate her more. For her
simplicity in what she ate which was always based on what she grew, and maybe
looking back makes me more romantic, but I do feel as if there was someone
there all along, teaching me without saying anything. Each stroll down her
basement stairs, past shelves of mason jars of tomatoes and beans and beets and
pickles and apples and apple sauce brings us closer together. When I was a kid,
not yet old enough to be trusted to open the refrigerator without greasing up
the stainless steel door, those jars were mysteries on the scale of what might
be found in a scientist’s laboratory. The jars came to represent what they
were: remnants of a distant past, an old world connection with what came from
the earth. In other words, not cool. There were no toys hidden beneath these
blobs of color. No chance of overdosing on chemically altered flavors like the
lemonheads and peanut butter cups and cool ranch Doritos I craved.
I appreciated only the visual. It
took many years before I was able to begin to understand what went into each
jar.
I now have my own urban farm, an
oasis in the 9th ward of New Orleans, smack dab in the middle of
Heroin Central and getting closer as we expand into adjacent lots. I wake to
indiscerning roosters—sometimes their crows begin before the sun comes up,
waving home the late night bar crawlers, waving on the restless crackheads
strolling around the block, waving on the morning newspaper man, waving on the
barges blowing blocks away.
Morning is different in Georgia.
There is mist and silence on this low lying field. I feel far from any guns,
with no worries about the water cans being stolen or a woman dying on the curb
in front of me with a needle in her arm while I gently water each seedling.
Farmer Ben’s chickens have been fed.
They know their place. They have everything they need. In addition to the feed
received each morning, these chickens get gifts of the vegetables that don’t
make it to market—cracked cantaloupes and tomatoes and watermelons give their
eggs a dark orange hue. There is a kinship between man and chicken, a symbiotic
relationship that extends past these creatures and back to the land.
The 9th ward chickens are
leftovers, refugees forgotten after a flood, scavengers that nobody cares for.
They subsist on paint chips and chicken bones. They eat the seedlings we plant
and tear through raised beds like anarchist bikers leaving ruts behind.
It will be months before the truth
of what I am doing hits me, before I realize that I have been trying to force the
very nature I praise to work for me. It will be months before I realize that
these creatures I once saw as the bane of my existence have been my willing
assistants all along. I believed them to be my enemy. I racked my brain with
ways to keep them away from what I started. All the while, they worked without
complaint. At the break of dawn, the roosters rounded up the crews. The laborers
turned the wood chips I spread and sacrificed their own waste to help these
break down. They turned dirt into soil. They could see further than sixty days
or ninety days or however long an annual takes.
It has taken years for me to slow
down and let what lives live and let what dies die. Death feeds life. It is
happening all around us.
