Growing

He was sitting on the sidewalk in front of McDonalds, face tan and worn, ragged bag by his side. I pulled at my farm hat, fumbled with my phone, swung the watering can, walked faster towards the farm site just a block up Park Blvd. I wanted to seem busy as I passed so he wouldn't ask me for anything. I didn't have any food except my leftovers in a tin pail. I couldn't give him the tin pail could I? Should I?
Two kids sat across from him munching on Sausage McMuffins and all I could think was how can people think, work, get healthy, get un-homeless eating that crap? Sure its a stretch, sure people with jobs eat Sausage McMuffins, but think of all the clarity, the health, the work that would get done if we didn't.

"Hey," he said. Do I acknowledge or no? Yes, he is a person. I braced myself to tell him I didn't have change.

"I need to be watered."

I looked at his blue eyes smiling up at me.  I readjusted the watering can in my hand. "Don't we all?" I thought but didn't say. I was sorry for thinking he just wanted money for me and having to tell myself he was human, I should interact. But we shared a smile, a brief connection. He made me think and feel in a different way for a moment and I grinned my way to the flower site with the interaction velcroed to my heart.

We call it the flower site because we haven't been able to grow food there because there is lead. But we are planting marigolds for Day of the Dead and corn and squash to send away to a lab to see if there is lead in the tissues, hoping we have planted and amended and healed the soil maybe just a little.
I lean on a digging fork and talk to fellow Ag students about circuitous routes to becoming a farmer. We talk about geeky excitement over seed catalogs and marvel at red and yellow kernels tunneled into the composting earth. About wanting to help, change, fight, and realizing it all comes back to food. We talk about gangs, the prison system, the school system, our neighborhoods. That pizza is classified as a vegetable in cafeterias across the country and that nutrient deficiencies can cause anger which can cause crime which locks people away which kills our communities.

We all need to be watered.

Back at the main farm I stared into the bolting row of lettuce. There are two ways to harvest lettuce for a fancy loose leaf mix: cut it all down  about an inch or two from the base and let it grow back or take the oldest leaves from the outside of the plant leaving the newest smallest ones to regenerate the bulk from the middle. Sudden all encompassing injury or many small damages? Which is a slower death and/or which gives us more out of (it's) life? It will never fully recover, but what is the least traumatic? How can it heal most fully?

The row still needs to be watered, even in its shorn state.
Especially in its shorn state.

I want to give those kids eating Sausage McMuffins an apple, a roasted beet, a freshly harvested Purple Haze carrot. I want to reestablish the connection between food and feeling, food and action, food and living. I want to nourish and water and grow back the traditions we have lost that tell us that food is the most important thing. For our physical AND social well being.

I'll need a really big watering can, but I'll find it.

FALLING

The tangled roots and stems lay in a pile next to thriving mint and basil. The globes gone, the hornworms picked off (and crushed between dirty fingers), the hope of continuing candy-like sweet flesh dissipating in the thickening air. The Equinox looms, the pulled tomato plants blanch and crisp in the September sun, a few droplets fall from the muggy sky. We cheer, scratch our sweaty foreheads, twist strands of salty, sun-bleached hair.
I will soon pull out my smartwool socks.
I will start taking hot baths.
I will soon stop craving ice cream every day after working on the farm.

We're trying for fall. Trying to fall into deeper darker nights and fuzzy hoodies and crisp apples in hand and creamy mexican mochas listening to Ella at coffeehouses and a beach clean of (plastic) (alcohol free) bottles and (sunburnt) (LOUD) tourists.
Pumpkins on vines and cloud islands in the brighter blue sky.
A few leaves crunchy in the gutter in front of Craftsman houses, craft beer in hand, holding (unsweaty) other  hands.
I will breath deep, look up, pull my knitted scarf tighter as I dig in cool damp soil. I will revive like the ailing squash leaves the morning after a hot afternoon.

(Falling in San Diego isn't the same. My red orange flaming tree isn't down the road, wood fires don't fill the air with delicious smoke, gardens aren't sung lullabies. But we still fall.)

Some of the tomato plants will survive the (barely) winter, renew themselves, realize its really not too cold to fruit. By then I will be thinking again about summer, about gossamer dresses with farm boots and warm ocean water and stone fruits in hand and sweaterless picnics in the park but still savoring the flavors of spiced cider and smell of pine.

Goodbye tomatoes. Goodbye squash. Hello my Autumn Redux.

Butterflies and teenagers

Monarchs don't give a shit who watches.

There she was, body all contorted, eggs pushed out of her body, missionary position. He was manically crawling on top of her, flapping his orange and black wings, his butterfly hips thrusting but missing the mark, like a drunk, body-painted frat boy on an episode of MTVs Spring Break.

They were right in the middle of the garden. They didn't even find a milkweed bush or stand of lavender to hide within. My friend P. and I squatted over them, watching their Discovery Channel antics making crude remarks and trying to reproduce porn movie music with our laughing mouths. Bow chicka bow bow. 

A little boy with a plastic box came wandering down the path. We giggled. "I'm looking for fig beetles." he said very matter of factly. "Hey, look! Monarchs! I've never held a Monarch!" He reached down. P. and I tried to stop him but he was determined. "Is that one OK?" he asked, pointing to the one on the bottom. "Yeah, she's just resting." I said. What was I supposed to say? I didn't know this kid or his mom or how much he knew about "the birds and the bees." Or butterflies in this case.

He shoveled both of them into his outstretched hand. "I think they're making babies," he said, cradling the conjugating couple. I burst out laughing and P. said under his breath, "Yeah, and now he has blue balls. They're pissed!" 

That's what you get for doing it in the middle of the farm. 

When I was in high school my friends and I would pile into my family's trusty Mercury Sable and head for the border. Straight to Revolucion we would go, laughing when the bouncers would sit us on their laps or try to kiss us, brushing past the boys waiting in line. Beers in hand, lights flashing to the rhythm of blasting dance music, we would climb onto boxes and poles and stages and into sweaty pits of underage testosterone. We wore short shorts and colorful clingy tops, arms spreading like wings as we shook adolescent hips. We'd rub up against the boys as we danced, engaging in behavior forbidden anywhere else but on those dirty dance floors. We were returning to our roots, young butterflies that we were.

Teenagers don't give a shit who watches.

Often we would piss the boys off, running away from their bulging pants. Not willing to finish what they say we started. 

That's what you get for trying to get some on a Tijuana dance floor.  

(cue Discovery Channel song)

trees

The world turns and all I can do is jump in

The seaweed wraps around my leg. Dirt from the farm washes through my toes and into the sand, into the surf. Salt covers my arms, my face. My hair loose and tangled and blond-tipped tumbles in a breeze that drifted past fishing boats beyond the horizon. I wade into the sea shuffling my feet to scare off stingrays and sink deeper into the bed that always comforts me. The sun is setting and I am alone and I am surrounded by people and I am listening to the whooshes and crackles over wet sand. The kelp lies quietly covered with flies and styrofoam and tiny plastic dolls and all other sorts of our land-bred pests. I turn to face the sun sinking towards the water wondering if there will be a green flash and wondering, doubting, hoping: have I actually ever seen a green flash? Do I make it up every time? What else is there to hope for in a sunset?
The seaweed wraps around my torso and the waves push and pull and cover me and I forget who I am and that I'm in the water and that we are usually separate.
The sky is pink and white, the bay purple as I walk home over sand and concrete (sand).
I already miss the water, the me I left in moon-ruled waves and am jealous of the sun seemingly snuggled in the churning frothy sea.

Saturday hummingbirds

An arc of water missed my bag (computer, phone, multiple notebooks, to do lists) by inches. I flipped the flap over the misted interior and smiled under my cap as I hastily moved my belongings away from any obvious plants.
She didn't speak much english. She had walked by the farm with her family a few days before and after lots of gestures and smiles and fragmented sentences, it was clear she wanted to help. We told her about volunteer hours on Saturday afternoons and went back to packing up bags of produce for our CSA members.
It was a quiet afternoon until my sole volunteer showed up. So she had understood us! I searched around for something for her to do that required little explanation. Amending a bed? Probably not. Planting starts? With my assistance, sure. Watering? Most of the beds have been watered, but...
I filled a watering can and gave it to her, showing her some Scarlet Runner beans surrounding our cob-benched rotunda. After liberally dousing the tendrils running up the curving poles, she decided that a watering can was not for her. Why sprinkle when you can soak? She took up the hose and let her rip. Butterflies and hummingbirds evacuated the rotunda as jets of water erupted from the bright yellow nozzle in her life-lined hands. She dragged the hose around lavender bushes and sunflowers. I was thankful there were few newly seeded beds in the immediate area but knew that that is why we are here- to let people come and water and weed and plant and be among the brassicas and butterflies. They might not do everything right (and hey, what professional farmer does everything right either?), but just coming to the farm and wanting to help is enough to make me smile. Even if a few seedlings get washed away in the process.
As quickly as she had appeared and sprung into action, she just as quickly coiled up the hose and motioned she needed to go meet her husband but said she'd be back next week. I gave her a ripe tomato and she bowed in thanks, cradling the blushing red gift in her hands as she shuffled down the slope to the concrete below.
The farm was quiet again save for the rustling of the corn and almost undetectable buzz of hummingbird wings. The leaves bore crystal droplets strewn about by another person who wants to help, another person who cares about food, another person moving through this life and taking the time (even if just a few minutes) to connect with the dirt and butterflies and tomatoes.

Moon

The moon is full above the bay, above the world surrounding this bay. It's so easy to forget how the world envelops the rest of the space around me, around what I see, feel, experience every day. It is a full moon, one of a blue, soon to be harvest moon. Last night the water was still, the ripples absent, the wind hiding behind mountains and desert. I thought of nights becalmed. One would think there would be silence on becalmed nights at sea: no wind, no waves. But the sails luff and the boom creaks slipping back and forth over the centerline of the cockpit where you sit impatiently waiting for a puff of breeze to fill the canvas. The inanimate indecision of the sails is maddening. And it is loud, the clanking of rigging mirroring thoughts and memories. You are waiting for wind that you wonder will ever come. You want the momentum, the pull, but not too much, not too suddenly. Then there it is and you scream in joy or smile in the darkness knowing that the warm breeze will surely last til Costa Rica.
Tonight the moon is fully full rising about salt stained waves. I can hear them against the beach. The sand. The tiny pebbles. The space in between where water gushes and retreats. It is bringing motion and movement and thoughts and feeling bubbling up in lapping licks against the shore.
Every month I can be reminded of the elemental truths. Do I choose to look up, soak in the knowledge of everything that came before? Or do I look straight ahead at the beachside rickety roller coaster lights a-blinking, the bars riotous and damp, the distracting noise?
We are floating in this world. On the sea, in the universe.
The moon already knows this. I want to learn.