Growing Into My Space

The weather turned this week from 60 to 85 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, and here in the southeastern United States, that's it; there's no going back. It's hot as Hades now well into October, and the lettuces are shaking in their boots, knowing bitter days beckon just around the corner. With just a few weeks left, they are growing like mad, and the changes in my mailbox garden (and the rest of my garden behind and on the side of my house) are noticable on a daily basis. The crops are growing into their space, and as is no surprise to me (since I have learned by now that what happens in the garden tends to happen in my life as well), so am I.

My sustainability work with my brand new city of Dunwoody is getting more and more interesting as I find new opportunities presenting themselves daily, the network of like-minded (or at least open-minded) citizens expanding, and the actions and impact of all this new energy starting to be evident everywhere I look.

* Buzz words like "walkable and bikable" are being thrown around everywhere. Last week was the kick-off of a new event called the BRAD (the Bike Ride Across Dunwoody) which raised money for bike lanes in our city. And "No Idling" campaigns, pedestrian crosswalk signs, and official Safe Routes to School programs are springing up, one by one, week by week.

* My friend, Lisa, who is on the Sustainability Commission with me, just launched a program called Mailbox Gardens of Dunwoody and already these little gardens are spreading throughout her neighborhood. She has positioned them as "sharing gardens" where neighbors grow herbs, flowers and quick-grow pickable veggies (think cherry tomatoes) so that neighbors can stroll around the 'hood and have a nibble or two and pick some basil leaves for dinner. Here is Lisa and her new Mailbox Garden of Dunwoody.

* Comcast Cares Day (a nationwide volunteer outreach day sponsored by the cable company) yesterday focused on building gardens in the Atlanta area. Farmer D supplied the beds, compost, plants and plans to about 13 different sites. Here is the brand new Alpharetta community garden:





















* We now have recycling at all our events (school, community, city). It is just a given.

* Local businesses "going green" shout out their changes in press releases daily.

* My in-box is filled every single day with more and more people right here in my city whom I never knew before who want to "get involved."

And so, yes, my garden is growing. My city is growing. And I am growing. In fact, I have some big news to share with you next week. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, let us know what steps forward in sustainability are happening in your community. And consider getting involved with policy work in your city--or at least check out your city website and/or City Council meeting. I, personally, am finding it actually kind of fun and surprisingly interesting. Who knew?!

Growing Into My Space

Around and Around We Go

My older daughter's hamster died this week on the day my house was filled with teenagers in celebration of yet another birthday. The birthdays seem to be spinning around faster.

Hosting teenagers is easy--give food and get out of the way. So, of course, I went out in the garden. As I cut hairy vetch and crimson clover to lay as mulch on my garden beds, I thought of the first hamster of hers that died years ago, and how this daughter arranged a funeral and belted out the song Circle of Life as little Sweetheart was laid in her final resting place.

From the day we arrive on the planet
And blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done
There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love
Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

So was it a coincidence, or just another in a long line of freaky occurrences, what happened that night? Kim Karelson, a mother of one of my daughter's friends, came by to pick up her teenager at 10 PM and sat at my kitchen table, a stranger to me just moments before, and we discovered that she owns the art gallery where my husband had purchased a piece of folk art for me years before. What's more, Kim is a painter and has a current show that features a painting of a ferris wheel. The circle theme had no intention of leaving just yet!

The night was busy and I didn't get a chance to see the painting on the internet until the next day, after my family and friends of each of my daughters attended a festival here in my brand new city of Dunwoody, Georgia. The festival, called Lemonade Days, has been held for the last ten years or so. It started as a way to raise money to replant trees after a tornado destroyed part of our community, a way to "make lemonade out of lemons." It has since grown into one of the crown jewel events around, with an entire community coming together to have some fun and make a difference (the event now raises money for historic preservation). In fact, I wonder if that original Lemonade Days so many years ago is what put us on the path to Cityhood in the first place.

Anyway, we walked a mile and a half or so each way, the dogwoods blooming now, the tulip poplar flowers about to open. I saw friends and talked about Citywide sustainability initiatives and took photos (including the one above), and finally met up with everyone again at the ferris wheel, watching as my husband and the younger girls circled the City that we call home in one bucket, the older girls in another. The carnival music filled the air, the treacly-sweet smell of cotton candy tickling my memory alive, reminding me of those summer nights in New York City when I would walk down to the San Gerraro festival in Little Italy, buy zeppoles six for a dollar and ride the ferris wheel all alone just to see the lights below and imagine the world--and my life--beyond. And here I was, all these years later, my children another year older, another hamster buried, another garden planted.

I came home and looked up Kim Karelson's art and found this photo of her ferris wheel painting. The title? Around and Around We Go.



Intending just to "flesh out" this post with some ferris wheel history, I discovered that the ferris wheel was designed by a man named George Washington Gale Ferris at the young age of 32 as a way to "one up" the Eiffel Tower at the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Considered a technical marvel at first, the ferris wheel later became a "white elephant" eyesore that was ultimately blown up with dynamite in order to dispose of it because it was considered useless. The irony, of course, is that the ferris wheel subsequently went on to become one of the most popular rides of all times.

And then, I read the line that made me suddenly, and surprisingly, fill up with tears. George Ferris died at the age of 37 of tuberculosis. He never knew what a contribution he made to the world, what simple joy he brought, what beauty.

As Kim Karelson says in her artist's statement:

In the soul of every realist painter is the naïve desire to hold and keep something safe against the passage of time.

George Ferris gave us a timeless pleasure, and a classic reminder of so many touchpoints in our lives, of all the circles of life we've experienced. Humbled by this accomplishment, I wonder yet again, What contribution can I make? What simple joy can I bring to the world?

Around and around we go, folks. Time passes. Hamsters die. Children age. Gardens grow. New faces show up at our kitchen tables. And the circle of life continues.

Around and Around We Go

The Particular Place I Call Home

I start thinking about it, my garden, in that suspended time and place 30,000 feet up, coming back from visiting my father-in-law in South Florida, where it had been a bit chilly but nothing like here in Atlanta, where it apparently snowed.

"The lettuces will be fine. The kale, downright happy. But the potatoes. They may be goners," I think to myself, imagining their leaves black and lifeless, knowing I had planted them too early, knowing I always do.

I walk through the garage door into the house and then out the back one, just like that, in one sweeping motion, no pause to check the mail or see if the hamsters are alive or breathe in that distinct smell of home. Because that smell isn't there, in my house, after these days away but rather outside, where I brush against the rosemary and lavender on my way to the paths, where mint sprigs crush beneath my flip-flopped feet. The potatoes have made it. The snow must have been brief. The cold, fleeting.

The sun never rises the next day. Sheets of rain and marbles of hail pellet the house. The laundry is piled up. The dishwasher is full. The stacks of things to be read and sorted cover the counter. Yet, I add the yeast to the the warm water, measure the whole wheat and grind the flax seeds and within moments the heels of my hands are pushing, folding, turning, pushing, folding, turning, rhythmically, mindlessly, and I am once again home.

My younger daughter asks if she can knead and I acquiesce reluctantly, missing the soft fullness of the dough the moment my hands stop. She tries to copy my rhythm but quickly changes cadence, her head bending down, her voice rising slightly to announce, "I have my own way of doing it," as well she should, as we each do when we make bread.

A long while later, her hands still busy, she calls to me and proclaims, "Look, Mom, a dough man!" I smile, and then tell her that, of course, the dough still needs to rise so the shape won't be retained, and I could almost kick myself for squashing her moment like that. But she replies, a content smile on her face, "I know. That doesn't matter."

That doesn't matter. That doesn't matter. I think of that, looking out across the soaking yard, a river of water racing from my neighbor's yard through mine, and onward downhill to the neighbor's yard beyond. The hammock swings gently in the downpour, singing out to me even in its sopping state.

I think of the night I wandered out from my father-in-law's condo and turned a corner I hadn't turned in the 19 years I've visited him and fell upon a grand old Southern oak tree I had never seen before, draped with Spanish moss. I called for my younger daughter, knowing she would revel at this find along with me, and sure enough, she did, pulling at the moss, climbing the tree, wondering if the fibers were usable, if we could knit a scarf from it or if it would dry out. . .

The next day, I ease onto the interstate, the wonderful NPR radio show Splendid Table accompanying me the way it has since my first of these seven organic farming classes when I first discovered it, this time with an interview with a winemaker from New Zealand and Australia. I think of how lovely she sounds, how gently she handles the interview, how the striations of the early morning light on my way to Cumming, Georgia match the lilt in her voice so far away so perfectly. I pass sleepy barns and horses grazing and everywhere wisteria dangling from trees, the sugar-sweet grapey smell of them permeating the air like some lost memory, like every lost memory.

At lunchtime, my fellow farm students and I linger around the outdoor tables with the Pughs of Cane Creek Farm and the former students who had returned to share their stories with us, bowls of a cheese-specked Mexican-inspired potato soup before us. We stretch and move seamlessly to the asparagus patch where we spread wheat straw, and on to the berry patch where we weed and talk, and talk some more, and finally to the hoop house where we pluck the suckers from the tomato plants, and then part once more to go back to our everyday lives.

Yet I don't want to go back, not to the everyday life from before this past week. No. Because the light has changed. The season has changed. The crops have changed, settled now in their spaces, reaching out, growing. The house is filled with the fragrance of baked bread. And the hammock calls.

All over the world, perhaps, the pace picks up with spring's new growth. But I live in the Southeastern United States, where heat will be rolling into town with the next train, and, although my work will somehow still get done, I have found my own way of doing it, a way that fits the particular place I call home. The abundant lemon balm outside my door makes one thing perfectly clear to me. It is time for tea.

The Particular Place I Call Home

"Beauty Is Not a Luxury"

The day was all "gray and green," as my friend John of the Bottle Tree put it, with clouds and wind and sun taking turns across the sky's stage, and the almost piercingly crisp green of spring exploding forth from trees and grass and bushes and every one of my vegetable beds. Those sticks that had sprouted from within my blackberry and juniper bushes, the ones I meant to cut down in the fall, have blossomed with Carolina jasmine flowers that look like angels have sprinkled them everywhere. The fig tree I replanted in the fall, whose fate I didn't know all winter, has leaves unfurling from its tips and even one sweet little baby fig as if to prove beyond a doubt that it, like us, has survived.

And there, by my front door, lay a package from Chronicle Books in San Francisco. I could feel my heart start to race as I walked toward it, picked it up and felt its heft.

I ripped it open and just stood there, its beauty overwhelming me. Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea, by Alice Waters is a truly special book. The size and shape and feel of the binding takes me right back to the downstairs children's section of the Mineola Library, in the village where I grew up, 16 miles and a 30-minute Long Island Rail Road ride outside New York City. I would have found a book like this and held it close to my heart. I would have known, instinctively, how delicious it would be.

I didn't intend to read it last night cover to cover, sitting there at the kitchen table, the arugula and tatsoi flowering right outside my window, the lawn speckled with dandelions. But the world was gray and green and Alice's blue-skyed sunflower-and-amaranth-filled cover photo mesmerized me.

Of course, I know all about the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California, how Alice helped transform an acre of asphalt at a middle school where the cafeteria was condemned near her restaurant, Chez Panisse, into a living, breathing model integrating a school garden, school food and culinary education. And then how she rolled that model out to all the Berkeley schools, and beyond. But I had not read the background story, especially not in her own words. (And the photos! And the children's writings!)

Now, listen, all this White House Garden stuff has led to lots of blog talk about how elite Alice Waters is. But let me tell you something. I choked up no less than three times during the reading of this brief book. Not because of what Alice did. Not because of the lives she has changed. But because of how soul-penetratingly beautifully she writes about it. If that's how Alice talks, and if that's what Alice can do with a piece of land or a piece of food, and if that makes her sound elite, well, goodness, bring it on. Because Alice doesn't discriminate between those paying top dollar in her restaurant and those paying their dues day in day out at an inner city school. Alice believes in beauty. In fact, the fifth Principle of Edible Education, according to Alice, is:

Beauty is a Language

A beautifully prepared environment, where deliberate thought has gone into everything from the garden paths to the plates on the tables, communicates to children that we care about them.

Alice says that "beauty is not a luxury; it is a means of lifting the human spirit and of giving richness to everyday life."

For anyone who is considering starting a school garden, I would highly recommend you read this book. And to anyone who wants to add more beauty to their lives as a way of living in concert with the color and fragrance and taste and texture of food, I'd say learn a thing or two from Alice.

My friend Debbie Smith, who founded and directs the sustainable toy company Idbids, has an organic plush flower character named Lola, who believes "pretty is as pretty does." Something tells me Lola and Alice would get along!

I wrote about Alice and school lunch almost two years ago here on FoodShed Planet. And yes, I still think about that peach.

"Beauty Is Not a Luxury"