On My Garden
My little 5x10 plot of paradise.
Welcome to the Tuesday post for all subscribers! On Friday, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for homemade pasta (!). As always, thank you for being here. You can learn more about me and my work here.
As you may recall from this amazing interview with Palita of Pink Salt Kitchens from last year, I am a novice gardener. I have a tiny plot in a community garden just north of me, and it brings me so much joy that I almost cannot express it.
Having a space, no matter how small, that I and my garden-mates can plant and tend in whatever way we choose is positively delightful—it’s like a power-trip of the purest kind. As I was leaving the garden yesterday, I couldn’t help but think that it fulfills a deep desire that I have had since I was young: for a secret place that was mine and mine alone.
I grew up reading books like Roxaboxen and Weslandia about kids who invented whole worlds in the environs in which they played. The magic realism that winds through both of these stories inspired many afternoons in our backyard, creating locales, businesses, and “homes,” from different landmarks. First, we made our own Roxaboxen, calling the half-fallen cherry tree with a hollow trunk the post office and running between the crab apple blossoms to deliver messages.
When we got older, that fantasy faded and we became enamored with the woods at the bottom of the hill in the back yard. The small depression between a criss-cross of tree trunks in the woods was Crockett’s Cove. A small clearing nearby that we planted with daffodil bulbs was Lady’s Locket. Between the two was a small road lined with bricks that we had found dumped there by construction crews.
The last time I was home, I walked through the backyard and the woods where we played. Everything seemed smaller and closer together, but the magic was still there. I could still imagine tripping over the gentle hills between the Locket and the Cove to deliver a message. I remember so clearly how hard we used to work to move leaves and sticks out of the way of the small, struggling spring in the backyard after a rain.
When the spring ran, we would frantically call our neighbor kids. Everyone would put on their snow boots and whatever pants our mothers would allow us to ruin and spend hours on end squelching around in the woods. We found snakes and dug trenches and followed the stream all the way down the neighborhood woods, watching as it grew stronger and more exciting, until we realized we had wandered into the next school district over.
We were old enough at that point that we weren’t playing pretend anymore. Our own Robaboxen had disappeared off the map years before. But there was something about being in the woods, covered in mud, following a stream to see where it would lead us that felt magical and natural—like we were following it to our own world where the grown-ups couldn’t find us.
That feeling of freedom and destiny and wild joy is hard to square with the pride that I feel when I look over my plot of rented space sandwiched in between two other plots, but I think deep down it comes from the same place. There’s a joy there, a deep and unrestrained, wild type of elation. There’s a sense of responsibility for what I’m growing there. An obligation to these plants that I’m cultivating and the bugs that live there too. A sense of wonder at what will come from this plot full of dirt and where it will lead us in the meantime.
Thanks as always for reading my ramblings! See you back here on Friday for pasta.