bombs in bottles
I have gardened nearly my entire life. One of my earliest memories is of my parents teaching me to plant corn. Another is from later that year, when I ate an entire peck of tomatoes by myself. That's a lot of tomatoes for a toddler! (Surprisingly, I suffered no ill effects.)
I moved a lot in my 20s and 30s. Anytime we moved someplace I couldn't garden, I had a lowkey anxiety that never resolved. An "it's not safe to be at the mercy of the commercial food supply chain" anxiety.
Despite having gardened nearly my entire life, I have never written much about gardening.
Mostly that's because of peer pressure. By which I mean that my mother and grandmother would have loved it if I had written about gardening. They "encouraged" me to do so.
Scare quotes are because what they expected was a particular kind of writing about gardening: the feel-good kind. The Farmer's Almanac, NPR, Lois Hole column type of writing. The Mary Oliver poetry kind. The "let me wax poetic about the gentle good earth" kind.
Reader, I do not write about gardening for one reason: People expect that kind of writing about gardening, and in my experience, gardening is not about communing with the gentle good earth. In my experience, gardening is METAL AS FUCK.
I garden to vent my frustrations through hard labor. I garden because the satisfaction of killing things to make room for other things is as close to perfection as human experience can get. Today I killed the absolute shit out of a patch of mint. It was GREAT.
I garden to punch Nazis. I garden in honor of my (other) grandmother, my grandfather, and their parents, who also gardened to punch Nazis. I garden because it's a giant green middle finger to fascism, no matter where it originated or which flag it waves. Trump may have pardoned the J6ers, but my spade has not forgiven them.
I garden because the worst thing that ever happened to me wasn't having eleven bones broken in the same moment that killed my husband. It was how people took advantage of me when I was bedridden through an entire growing season. I garden because those people ain't shit, and what they did to me ain't shit. I garden because I'm stronger than they will ever dare to be.
I garden because no matter how tough I am, the garden is tougher. My (other other) grandmother used to say "you can't kill nothing," and she was right. A garden will always bounce back. A garden will always figure its shit out. Its shit will definitely not be YOUR shit, because a garden gives no shits what your plans were for a garden.
But a garden will always grow. A garden will always choose abundance. A garden doesn't fuck around asking itself what the purpose of existence is or whether it should continue in the face of hardship. A garden answered that question before hominids existed. A garden answered that question before the Big Bang. A garden's answer is forever Yes.
I don't write about gardening because nobody wants to hear that gardening is the most hardcore punk thing I have ever done.
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