In Touch

A few weeks ago I took Gwendolyn out to cut back some of our overgrown bushes. After only a short time of watching me work, she wanted to try the hedge clippers. So I helped her put her small hands on the handles in the right direction and led the blades toward some snapdragons. (Snapdragons don't require much force to cut.) The clippers were too heavy for Gwendolyn to hold up, but if I bore the weight then she could manage to pull hard enough to cut the weeds. She remained quite focused and patient with the task, more so than I would have expected from a young lady who throws a fast tantrum when she can't get her arm in a shirt sleeve right away.

When I go out to check the garden in the morning I take Gwendolyn along. She helps to weed the squash beds, getting very dirty in the process. The carries the bucket behind me to pick strawberries and, today, early green beans. She knows which asparagus spears to grasp and how to break them off. (She also knows that they can be eaten right there in the lawn.) Soon she will know where tomatoes come from and how to pull up carrots from the soil.

I have some agendas for my daughter's education. One of them is for her to learn that food--ultimately all food--comes from the soil. I want her to understand that dirt--the stuff we wash off before meals and bedtime, the stuff we pave over with concrete, the stuff that looks lifeless and bland--is the substrate of life. I want her to know that no matter how advanced we humans become in areas of technology and medicine we still have a symbiosis with soil. I want her never to think that food "comes from" the supermarket in any broad sense. Behind every bunch of grapes in the produce aisle I want her to see a hillside in Chile or a vineyard in Ithaca. I want her to have a keen awareness that humanity cannot, strictly speaking, produce food for itself; God must grow food from the earth.

We are blessed to live in a rural community where the green of life grows up all around us: where weeds take over, alfalfa thickens on the curves of the land, and cows are milked for the cheese we eat. Wherever we live in the future, I want Gwendolyn to know about earth, and what it means to have one's hands in it.

~ emrys