Notes from the garden.

Every morning Wilder and I walk to the garden. He prefers to walk straight through the two hulking evergreens in our front yard—the boughs of each reach toward each other and create a canopy of dark trees. He also prefers that I not follow him, instead motioning for me to go around to the right, where we’ll meet on the other side. Once reconnected we continue on our way, though he may stop to throw a rock or pick a dandelion.

Inside, we’ll survey. A garden is its best first thing in the morning before the sun has risen. It’s crisp, alert, open. The blossoms arch their bodies up and back to entice the bees. The greens are happy with their cool night and crunchy to the touch. The tomatoes are not yet making their demands but instead feeling content with their place in the world.

Throughout the inspection Wilder will snack. Mostly snow peas, but he is also likely to stuff in his mouth green beans, a leaf of kale, and, once discovering a ripe strawberry, he will spit all else out, dutifully carve out the green top as I showed him, and tear into the fruit, juices flowing.

The garden brings me a mix of emotions. Upon entering I am faced with everything I’ve done wrong, everything I’ve chosen to ignore. There are vegetables that will take your inadequacies in stride and there are those that will not. My squash, this year, have been sorely disappointed in the lack of pollination and my lack of attention to the issue. They have been self-aborting. It’s heartbreaking, seeing little baby squash after little baby squash commit kamikaze, diving off their stem into the dirt. I promise to do better, learning how to connect a male blossom’s pollen to female blossom’s stigma. It is a bizarrely human act.

In equal measure to the frustration and despair is fulfillment and wonder. As I walk to the garden while Wilder sleeps, I remind myself of the tremendous act of growing. If nothing else, the soil I am building is now healthier and stronger than four seasons ago when it began.

This has been deemed The Year of the Snowpea, so bountiful and delicious they have been. “What will we do without snowpeas?” laments James in recognition of the oncoming season when we feel the cooling breeze. The strawberries, herbs, and lettuces have been equally rewarding and in amounts I can share.

And so gardening releases unbridled joy. It doesn’t actually make sense—the amount of time, resources, effort that it takes to hold a single beet in ones hand cannot be quantified (assuredly higher than the cost of a supermarket beet). When holding the beet, however, nothing else matters. There were likely tears, violent invasions, a fraction of the production you had hoped for—but my god, THE BEET. Joy is present in incalculable, nonsensical amounts. It is enough, somehow, to carry you into another season of melodrama.

It is likely this unknowing that attracts me most to gardening. Even the finest among us are at the mercy of what the earth brings, be it drought or hail, virus or invader. But beyond this is its deeply physical, deeply sensual practice. It demands you put your hands in dirt. It demands you get on your knees. It demands you sweat. It demands you pay attention to what surrounds, it demands you don’t stick tightly to your own desires because they will likely be trampled to nothing.

“You know your grandmother could grow anything from a clipping,” says dad two weeks ago when he was visiting. “Don’t you remember her fuchsias?” I don’t. “Man, she must have had over two dozen varieties in the garden. Whenever she came across one she didn’t have, she’d just take the tiniest snippet and put it in water. Weeks later it would be abundant.”

He chokes up even then. There is so little I know about my grandma and yet this rings true. I remember in my earliest visits to her little home in the East Bay a garden full of flowers. I remember coming one year and it feeling stark. “It’s becoming too much work,” she said.

My dad’s comment makes me feel alive. Growing is in my blood. I march confidently that day toward the beds. “My grandma was a great gardener,” running through my head. I had always imagined my great-great-grandmother, Jacinta, to be. She ran the quinta in São Caetano on the island. Kale, gourds, chickens were all in her charge. Her earth, like mine, was full of rocks. This land is the site of tectonic plates colliding millions of years ago, the ramifications of which I feel every time I try to push my spade into the ground. My grandmother’s island is actually a volcano, the earth of which is all rock, all basalt, all black and porous and rough. Growing—despite the challenges—is in my blood.

I am increasingly obsessed with the future. I have almost always been someone obsessed with the past, unwilling to move past what I wish I could have held on to. These days I have no time for that, nor do I care. What dominates my mind is wondering what I am giving to Wilder, what I am leaving him with, what he will need, what he can provide.

It is beautiful to watch him move among the boxes, to point at the fruit of our labor, to say “broc!” ecstatically when he sees new side shoots from the broccoli plants. I love watching him trudge to the faucet to turn off the hose, I love handing him the basket and saying “Time to harvest”. I love his slight crouch as he looks under the bean leaves for a long green one he can pick. I love that he eats straight off the vine, that he sways when he waters, that he smells flowers, I love that so much of this I have never told him to do, he has simply intuited. I love that though I cannot control any outcome, somewhere in his tiny body is the feeling of his hands in the dirt.