I'm almost finished reading a book called Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works by Atina Diffley.
It's roughly about a family who are always either at risk of losing their land to development, or trying to catch up to their dreams on faith and intuition. So I'm nearing the end of this thing, daydreaming on the porch with my mothers' day flowers in their pots when it hits me. All gardening/farming comes with risk. Crop failure, market conditions, etc. But what struck me was this realization:
Fear of losing another piece of my heart to land I don't own has been stalling me. Our souls were wrapped up in the land at my Grandmother's place and it was heartbreaking to watch it hemmed in by development, then essentially repossessed by circumstances. I thought I had been waiting to own land initially. Now I know that I've been holding out for earth that can't be suddenly taken with no notice or empathy. Same thing, different way of looking at it.
Yet the more agricultural narratives I read, I notice that so many people are putting their everything on the line with no security that they will even be able to harvest. I cried reading about the little boy in the book who stood at the edge of the bulldozer scrape and howled while they erased the fields he knew.
That's how I felt. I wanted to tear down the barbed wire at the homestead with my bare hands when I saw it go up on my little hill. All I felt after it was installed was the pressure of something that shouldn't exist, pushing... and the bare earth where the apple orchard I'd grown up in had been gouged clean. The sunset had even been stolen when the warehouse went up at the west property line. A line of herbicide burned down the vines that had shyly crept up in my defense against that damned fence.
So there it was. There was the reason I've been afraid to just DO THIS RIGHT NOW. Not fear of getting in trouble, but fear of losing my heart again.
The minute I realized this, I suited the boys up with gloves while Jack napped and we went around the fence to the abandoned lot. I started kicking giant rhubarb leaves to warn anything crawly I was coming and just began ripping everything out by the roots. It must have been satisfying because before I realized it, I'd cleared nearly the whole yard.
Jake and Jude were in heaven, hauling vegetation to the side for me, scouting for snakes and spiders, pulling out grass and tossing bottles. It must have felt like home for them, too. Like it used to be, before our homestead was cut off. When they'd follow behind their Dad and me gathering cut grass and helping to move logs and boulders. The glory of leaping up and stretching my body to reach dead branches as I cleared a sunny patch was heaven.
Watching my sons bravely haul things 'too big' for them was good medicine for us all. We vinagered poison ivy, tossed trash and scrounged the yard for lumber and bricks to frame the garden. Even found a few buckets to help haul. Jake documented everything with the phone, commenting like a reporter. Jude kept saying,"Here mommy... lemme git dat for ya." "Here, here. No, I got it. Don't worry about it." I saw the freedom come back into their eyes this morning.
When we finished, the yard was able to be walked through and a sunny patch torn out of the canopy. A modest raised bed now lies there looking tired and happy in its sun patch, waiting for us to come again tomorrow. My arms and legs are scratched and my body aches with satisfaction.
I feel home.
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