Growing

He was sitting on the sidewalk in front of McDonalds, face tan and worn, ragged bag by his side. I pulled at my farm hat, fumbled with my phone, swung the watering can, walked faster towards the farm site just a block up Park Blvd. I wanted to seem busy as I passed so he wouldn't ask me for anything. I didn't have any food except my leftovers in a tin pail. I couldn't give him the tin pail could I? Should I?
Two kids sat across from him munching on Sausage McMuffins and all I could think was how can people think, work, get healthy, get un-homeless eating that crap? Sure its a stretch, sure people with jobs eat Sausage McMuffins, but think of all the clarity, the health, the work that would get done if we didn't.

"Hey," he said. Do I acknowledge or no? Yes, he is a person. I braced myself to tell him I didn't have change.

"I need to be watered."

I looked at his blue eyes smiling up at me.  I readjusted the watering can in my hand. "Don't we all?" I thought but didn't say. I was sorry for thinking he just wanted money for me and having to tell myself he was human, I should interact. But we shared a smile, a brief connection. He made me think and feel in a different way for a moment and I grinned my way to the flower site with the interaction velcroed to my heart.

We call it the flower site because we haven't been able to grow food there because there is lead. But we are planting marigolds for Day of the Dead and corn and squash to send away to a lab to see if there is lead in the tissues, hoping we have planted and amended and healed the soil maybe just a little.
I lean on a digging fork and talk to fellow Ag students about circuitous routes to becoming a farmer. We talk about geeky excitement over seed catalogs and marvel at red and yellow kernels tunneled into the composting earth. About wanting to help, change, fight, and realizing it all comes back to food. We talk about gangs, the prison system, the school system, our neighborhoods. That pizza is classified as a vegetable in cafeterias across the country and that nutrient deficiencies can cause anger which can cause crime which locks people away which kills our communities.

We all need to be watered.

Back at the main farm I stared into the bolting row of lettuce. There are two ways to harvest lettuce for a fancy loose leaf mix: cut it all down  about an inch or two from the base and let it grow back or take the oldest leaves from the outside of the plant leaving the newest smallest ones to regenerate the bulk from the middle. Sudden all encompassing injury or many small damages? Which is a slower death and/or which gives us more out of (it's) life? It will never fully recover, but what is the least traumatic? How can it heal most fully?

The row still needs to be watered, even in its shorn state.
Especially in its shorn state.

I want to give those kids eating Sausage McMuffins an apple, a roasted beet, a freshly harvested Purple Haze carrot. I want to reestablish the connection between food and feeling, food and action, food and living. I want to nourish and water and grow back the traditions we have lost that tell us that food is the most important thing. For our physical AND social well being.

I'll need a really big watering can, but I'll find it.