I sit in a shaft of sunlight beside my daughter
As she nurses her newborn baby.
The milk has not come in,
Nor has the child been named.
There is only our faith in colostrum,
That first mysterious flow of baby manna.
I find an emery board in the medicine chest
And file the tiny thumbnail of my grandchild’s left hand.
There is the slightest brushing, a feathery sensation
As the sand on the board smoothes the edge of the nail.
The only other movements in the room
Are my daughter’s hand stroking the infant’s hair
And the soft tightening of the baby’s hand
Around my index finger.
Perhaps a few new dust motes rise
In this shaft of sunlight falling on the three of us.
There are only two ways to live your life.
So says Albert Einstein.
One is as though nothing is a miracle;
The other is as though everything is.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Cezanne's Carrot: “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution!”*
After three hours yesterday morning weeding our plot in Friendship Community Garden, I got home exhausted, filthy, and happy. Unfit for any more exercise than a shower, I rewarded myself for all that bending, digging, pulling, and hauling with a pleasurable read, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Community Gardening, which fortuitously arrived in the afternoon mail.
Community Gardening, part of BBG’s excellent series of all-region guides, reassured me that what I’ve believed for thirty years is indeed true: Community gardening is pleasurable, healthful, psychologically and physically therapeutic, and socially beneficial. What’s more, it’s part of a new, cool, hip urban synergy that, if undertaken in every city and town across America, will save the Republic and perhaps the entire planet, albeit one garden at a time. BBG is not alone in this belief. See also DC Urban Gardeners, American Community Gardeners Association, USDA Cooperative Extension Service, and The American Horticultural Association’s Master Gardeners Programs .
Like the gardens highlighted in Community Gardening, we don’t use pesticides, and we know that everything we grow – fertilized only with our own vegetable manure – is e.coli free. Our family plot is a little smaller than our kitchen. Still, we’re pretty much fruit-and-veggie-self-sufficient from Mother’s Day to Halloween. Starting in May we had two mesclun, lettuce, and spinach salads everyday for ten weeks. We enjoyed raspberries for breakfast every morning through all of June and froze about ten quarts for jelly-making in the fall. In June and July, squash blossoms stuffed at eight in the morning with farmer’s cheese, parmesan, breadcrumbs, and herbs and refrigerated until cooking time a minute before dinner were heavenly, and we’ve had them almost four times a week now. Multicolored beets enliven our salads more splendidly than store-bought tomatoes or those plasticky expensive things that are passed off as red, yellow and orange peppers in the grocery store. Last night we had grilled zucchini with a basil-flavored omelet and pumpernickel bread. Tonight there’ll be squash soup made from a recipe I tweaked from the website of Jill Nussinow, the Veggie Queen of Sonoma County, California. My version will be seasoned with curry, decorated with dollops of yoghurt, and dressed up with fresh basil leaves. Real tomatoes and peppers are coming soon, as are yellow and green beans and blackberries. Come late August, we’ll plant fall crops of lettuce, spinach, and beets to harvest well into October, when we’ll regretfully put the garden to bed for the winter.
Our fellow gardeners are genial sources of short bursts of neighborhood gossip, political quips, folk wisdom, gardening advice, and weather commentary. They are a terse, hard working group, not prone to longwinded discourse, which is fine, since we’ve got more than our fair share of verbosity here in DC. We’re called Friendship Community Gardens, but it’s more an easy-going camaraderie than friendship that we share. In April we had a communal workday to fine-tune the bylaws, clean up the paths, turn over the compost heap, and plan strategies to ward off the deer and other predators who make fast and loose with our Swiss chard. We trade produce, plants, and observations on what’s growing well, what isn’t. Offspring of our raspberry plants grow three gardens away beside the communal hose bib; perennial Greek oregano from a plot garden beyond the big old communal figtree is now in my plot between a pink zinnia and my yellow sweet peppers. In September all the gardeners will have a harvest supper together, followed a couple of weeks later by another workday when we put the garden to bed for the winter.
We used to get our kids and their friends to help plant, weed, and harvest, but they’re all grown now, with gardens and CSA farmshares of their own. Since our plot’s almost too big for just the two of us, we give much of the bounty away to friends who don’t have gardens. A few children do help their parents, but mostly we’re a pretty long-in-the-tooth crowd of old phogeys these days. I wish some kids and Gen-Xers would join us. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden book describes community gardens in New York City schoolyards introducing at first balky and then enthusiastic city kids to the pleasures of intergenerational gardening. DC’s 7th Street Garden is doing just that, I’m glad to say. I love the idea of families planting together, tilling together, harvesting together.
Last February while I longed for spring planting time to come, I started reading about Victory Gardening during World Wars I and II. I spent a good day digging around in the Martin Luther King Library’s Washingtoniana archives, where I discovered that our Friendship Community Gardens started in 1943 as part of the homefront's war effort. On a March day too wet to spend double digging in my garden I found the Library of Congress's online photo archive documenting the amazing wartime grassroots effort that turned vacant DC lots into productive garden space, mobilized small children and retirees into active participants in the collective effort to win the war, channeled nervous energy and fears about the war into productive, therapeutic physical work, and developed a wholesome, can-do community spirit all across the city and the nation. Next winter, when I’m itching to get my hands into the dirt again, to eat a real tomato, and to get all sweaty in DC’s long, sultry summertime, maybe I’ll write something about that amazing period in local DC history.
Maybe by next year’s planting season this Community Gardening movement will reach a tipping point and a whole army of urban community gardeners will bring all the benefits of agriculture to cities all across America. Look, if Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project could mobilize the City of New York to undertake Community Gardening, then we can do it! If City Slicker Farms (Oakland CA), Nuestras Raices Farm (Holyoke MA), and East New York Farms! (Brooklyn NY) can make community urban gardening a way of life, then so can we! If Alice Waters can found Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School’s Edible Schoolyard (Berkeley CA), then so can we!
*The Cezanne quotation is the motto of MLK Middle School's Edible Schoolyard.
Community Gardening, part of BBG’s excellent series of all-region guides, reassured me that what I’ve believed for thirty years is indeed true: Community gardening is pleasurable, healthful, psychologically and physically therapeutic, and socially beneficial. What’s more, it’s part of a new, cool, hip urban synergy that, if undertaken in every city and town across America, will save the Republic and perhaps the entire planet, albeit one garden at a time. BBG is not alone in this belief. See also DC Urban Gardeners, American Community Gardeners Association, USDA Cooperative Extension Service, and The American Horticultural Association’s Master Gardeners Programs .
Like the gardens highlighted in Community Gardening, we don’t use pesticides, and we know that everything we grow – fertilized only with our own vegetable manure – is e.coli free. Our family plot is a little smaller than our kitchen. Still, we’re pretty much fruit-and-veggie-self-sufficient from Mother’s Day to Halloween. Starting in May we had two mesclun, lettuce, and spinach salads everyday for ten weeks. We enjoyed raspberries for breakfast every morning through all of June and froze about ten quarts for jelly-making in the fall. In June and July, squash blossoms stuffed at eight in the morning with farmer’s cheese, parmesan, breadcrumbs, and herbs and refrigerated until cooking time a minute before dinner were heavenly, and we’ve had them almost four times a week now. Multicolored beets enliven our salads more splendidly than store-bought tomatoes or those plasticky expensive things that are passed off as red, yellow and orange peppers in the grocery store. Last night we had grilled zucchini with a basil-flavored omelet and pumpernickel bread. Tonight there’ll be squash soup made from a recipe I tweaked from the website of Jill Nussinow, the Veggie Queen of Sonoma County, California. My version will be seasoned with curry, decorated with dollops of yoghurt, and dressed up with fresh basil leaves. Real tomatoes and peppers are coming soon, as are yellow and green beans and blackberries. Come late August, we’ll plant fall crops of lettuce, spinach, and beets to harvest well into October, when we’ll regretfully put the garden to bed for the winter.
Our fellow gardeners are genial sources of short bursts of neighborhood gossip, political quips, folk wisdom, gardening advice, and weather commentary. They are a terse, hard working group, not prone to longwinded discourse, which is fine, since we’ve got more than our fair share of verbosity here in DC. We’re called Friendship Community Gardens, but it’s more an easy-going camaraderie than friendship that we share. In April we had a communal workday to fine-tune the bylaws, clean up the paths, turn over the compost heap, and plan strategies to ward off the deer and other predators who make fast and loose with our Swiss chard. We trade produce, plants, and observations on what’s growing well, what isn’t. Offspring of our raspberry plants grow three gardens away beside the communal hose bib; perennial Greek oregano from a plot garden beyond the big old communal figtree is now in my plot between a pink zinnia and my yellow sweet peppers. In September all the gardeners will have a harvest supper together, followed a couple of weeks later by another workday when we put the garden to bed for the winter.
We used to get our kids and their friends to help plant, weed, and harvest, but they’re all grown now, with gardens and CSA farmshares of their own. Since our plot’s almost too big for just the two of us, we give much of the bounty away to friends who don’t have gardens. A few children do help their parents, but mostly we’re a pretty long-in-the-tooth crowd of old phogeys these days. I wish some kids and Gen-Xers would join us. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden book describes community gardens in New York City schoolyards introducing at first balky and then enthusiastic city kids to the pleasures of intergenerational gardening. DC’s 7th Street Garden is doing just that, I’m glad to say. I love the idea of families planting together, tilling together, harvesting together.
Last February while I longed for spring planting time to come, I started reading about Victory Gardening during World Wars I and II. I spent a good day digging around in the Martin Luther King Library’s Washingtoniana archives, where I discovered that our Friendship Community Gardens started in 1943 as part of the homefront's war effort. On a March day too wet to spend double digging in my garden I found the Library of Congress's online photo archive documenting the amazing wartime grassroots effort that turned vacant DC lots into productive garden space, mobilized small children and retirees into active participants in the collective effort to win the war, channeled nervous energy and fears about the war into productive, therapeutic physical work, and developed a wholesome, can-do community spirit all across the city and the nation. Next winter, when I’m itching to get my hands into the dirt again, to eat a real tomato, and to get all sweaty in DC’s long, sultry summertime, maybe I’ll write something about that amazing period in local DC history.
Maybe by next year’s planting season this Community Gardening movement will reach a tipping point and a whole army of urban community gardeners will bring all the benefits of agriculture to cities all across America. Look, if Bette Midler’s New York Restoration Project could mobilize the City of New York to undertake Community Gardening, then we can do it! If City Slicker Farms (Oakland CA), Nuestras Raices Farm (Holyoke MA), and East New York Farms! (Brooklyn NY) can make community urban gardening a way of life, then so can we! If Alice Waters can found Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School’s Edible Schoolyard (Berkeley CA), then so can we!
*The Cezanne quotation is the motto of MLK Middle School's Edible Schoolyard.
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