Habit Brain
Oh my. How I don’t like being told what to do. How I make like a turtle and pop my head into my shell of self assurance, how I am wont to blame the very person telling me what to do for not understanding, how I want to prove him wrong.
He tells me that they want the garden to be aesthetically pleasing. This I understand. And this I also rebel against. Six boxes that have grass growing through them. 95 degree days. Only watering cans to keep what is growing alive. But I dropped seeds a month ago, old seeds of watermelon and okra and pigeon pea and squash and other beans. Never once watered. Let these grow between the grass and reach for the sky. Let the strongest survive.
Today I considered a maxim often expressed in the world of permaculture. The problem is the solution. I saw a grasshopper the size of a giant’s thumb. I watched an attack bird–not a hawk or a falcon–with wide wings stand wait on a power line, watched her shift to the top of a pole, feet from me.
The problem: grass. The problem: they don’t make lawnmowers the way they used to.
So I whacked the grass and then raked this and then, alas! This same grass could be used along with the wood chips to mulch what already existed. Take care of what is already there before planting more. The five fig trees and eight or so citrus. Four guava. Peanut butter fruit. Cherry of the Rio Grande. Jamun. And what I can’t remember. The happiest of the dozen? A lemon covered in long bean, the strands wrapping through new growth, a pigeon pea and cassia growing at her feet.
Angie let me borrow her lawnmower, to get the ground looking right for the eyes of those unaccustomed to wilderness, for those who cannot imagine what might happen when a canopy forms. And there is nothing wrong with this. Nothing wrong with anything when I slow down, poke my head proud out of my shell and realize that the pile of broken concrete and bricks can be used for the edges of the school garden. Let the eye see the way nature knows not a straight line, yet let the eye know that there are edges. Edges are where magic happens.
And so when I approach what will be the same either way, with curiosity and wonder, what happens is limitless possibilities. What happens is MS calls me and wants to help. What happens is I call and order a sheet cake for my 14th sobriety birthday while loading chunks of concrete that are later built into a wall by MS.
And my heart opens so that when C and T text to ask if they might come by, even though we’ve never met, even though they just moved here from Arizona, I say yes. I ask them to walk through the yard while I shower, tired and satisfied with the borders created at the school garden, with what is growing, with the experiments I will begin tomorrow, putting down surinam cherry seedlings to see if they will survive the winter.
T says that they want to create a map of all the fruit trees in the neighborhood. Immediately, the same thought that happens later when I see R carrying a basket (and assume she has picked figs) that who are they to come and take the fruit that we’ve worked so hard to foster.
Then I remember the men who C. caught a few years ago, how he said, “Did you tell some guys they could pick your persimmons?”
“No.”
“There’s some guys out there with a five-gallon bucket.”
I ran outside. Not only a five-gallon bucket, but a ladder to boot.
I took the bucket, gave each one of them one persimmon and thanked them for their help.
So I see it like this, as the fruit spreads, what if what people pick is what might be eaten while standing in the shade of the tree, certainly no more than what a family might eat in one night.
And these people who came into my life today, I wonder how they will fit as CRISP continues, as the edible forest grows, and maybe a map might be just what is needed along with an asterisk. *pick only what you can eat. No hoarding.
And this no hoarding, this is coming from a guy who threw a yearly festival that friends jokingly called the annual clean Zach’s yard festival because I would get rid of all that I had loaded into my truck and dumped in the yard the year prior.
