Returning to the Earth

The pastors in the churches of my childhood sermonized that Heaven would have pearl-inlaid gates and streets like rivers of gold. Many artists have rendered their own version of Heaven, setting the glimmering city atop columns of clouds attended by figures dressed in all-white gowns. In this place, unlike anything we’ve ever imagined, we would want for nothing. It is perfect.

The sterility of that image is uninviting. I’d like to think Heaven is akin to my grandfather’s gardens and their rich soil. The sun spreading its golden fingertips on corn stalks and ripe watermelons sitting heavy in the patches. California pepper trees swaying over the land like watcher women.

My grandfather worked the earth, seeding his love and respect, and it paid him back in full. My grandparents had no need to buy tomatoes, corn, collard greens, plantains, or the occasional gourd from the grocery store. Neither did they need pears, figs, apples, lemons, or oranges.

My grandfather trusted his garden— there was no question about what he was growing or where it came from. He watched it grow from seed to fruiting body, to the sustenance my grandmother prepared for their evening meals.

As a child following him around his property, he would stop and offer me treats. A fig he’d been saving in his shirt pocket for a snack. A handful of tangerines he was going to keep in his den. He often offered me tomatoes. He plucked the round red jewels off the vine, wiped them with his hands, and then bit into them like he would an apple. This struck me as indecent. He neither cared to wash nor cook the tomatoes first!

There was a deep inextricable affection that he poured into the earth and that reached back up to him. I took from his gardens a penetrating envy that transformed into yearning. I could never shake the feeling as it grew with me into adulthood and as I tried to find a home on my own plot of desert in Nevada.

My backyard was a grievance. I kicked at the earth. I muttered curses at it. Weeds sprung up along the cement patio and in patches around the yard. The weeds browned and yellowed, but their dead carcasses stayed upright in mockery. Dust storms picked up my yard and swirled in the air. In the aftermath, my husband and I took turns sweeping the yard off the patio like it was a displaced sandbox.

I loved the wide undeveloped land that bordered our neighborhood, but I saw these spaces as proof that our own yard could not be tamed. My husband and I settled for the idea of sinking a couple hundred dollars into expanding our cement patio outward a few feet so that our children could ride their tricycles with greater freedom. But first, we had to save up for a new air conditioner. We aimed for 2021. Then, we would transform our backyard, capping it off as one would a dry well.

I turned to the garden at our neighborhood elementary school for comfort. On the days my family and I walked to the school to run in its soccer field and enjoy the playgrounds, I made us stop by the school’s garden first. Near the gate leading to the field were three identical cement planters. We circled each one and peered through the tall vegetation in search of hidden treasures. My husband and I talked to our children about photosynthesis and plant growth, about how seeds grew into the fruit we ate at home. We poked in the dirt looking for bugs and talked about how they hurt and helped the different plants.

There wasn’t much in the school’s garden beyond yellow daisies struggling to survive the weeds choking them. We were a day or two late in finding the lone watermelon that had grown amongst the chaff. Birds had gotten into it and its body lay split open and picked over. Prodding the wreckage, I took comfort in knowing that it would have been flavorless anyway.

With a little care, the school garden could have been bountiful. Digging in the planters alongside my children, I imagined adopting the garden as my own and maintaining it for free. I imagined starting a garden program in partnership with the school. I wanted to gather a small group of schoolkids around the garden once or twice a week to pass down the love of land and soil my grandfather had given me. I finished all my dreaming as my daughters pulled impatiently at my hands. My family and I walked behind the school to the playgrounds until the sun dipped below the Spring Mountains in the distance.

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In March 2020, quarantine began in the United States. I restocked our emergency freezer, checked our supplies, and refreshed our bug-out bags. I cleaned our house from top to bottom. In moments when I needed a respite, I walked out onto the back patio to gather myself, then reemerged emotionally tidied. I heard whispers about shortages at grocery stores nationwide. It was more than just flour, sugar, and paper products. There weren’t enough vegetables, and those currently filling the produce aisles were less fresh than desired. Our family received the bulk of our dinner meals through a meal-kit subscription delivered to our door in an insulated box. When fresh fruits and vegetables were hard to come by at stores across Las Vegas, the delivery service appeared to be a boon. Fresh vegetables were guaranteed to us each week.

In early April, I opened our first box for the month and laid out the recipe cards. Usually I would pull out the ingredients and place them on the corresponding card, anticipating what we would eat for the week. This time, however, I pulled out the bok choy and paused. Then I pulled out the sweet peppers, spinach, garlic, and zucchini. The vegetables had not fully matured. They were small, picked in a half-state between bounty and lack. I chopped them for each meal and my heart broke at what little there was. The vegetables shrank into near nothingness as I sauteed them. They disappeared in the meals once mixed in. It was as if they had not existed at all. The experience was disheartening, and, like most things competing with the social chaos in the background, cooking became exhausting.

As did many Americans, I turned to fast food and carryout. As #TakeoutTuesday trended, my husband and I participated to help jumpstart our local hospitality industry. Las Vegas was, after all, built on hospitality, and its economy had plummeted once quarantine started. The doorbell chimed when our food arrived and, in their excitement, my children spun around the living room, bumping into the furniture and walls like wild ballerinas. I cooked less often and bought more fast food and takeout. The doorbell rang and rang, and my children spun faster and faster. Their disappointment was palpable on the days when delivery services brought packages instead of food. As I watched them spin away, I realized that the pandemic was fueling their own disconnect from the world around them. It had been so long since they set foot in a grocery store or wandered around a park or garden. I only thought about how. How could I change this? How could I reset their minds? How could I keep them connected to the earth? How could I keep us from being swept away in the current?

I took my stresses out onto the back patio. I stared at my backyard and damned it for not being what I really wanted: a greenhouse that I could escape into. A place with plants that reached out to me like lovers and my name hissing up from the sprinkler heads. A place cut off from the clamoring contagion infiltrating the world. A place that offered a solution like the gardens of my childhood.

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When I was seven or eight, I took a field trip to a local farm with my classmates. This was the ’90s in San Diego, California. I stepped off the purple and white school bus blaring R&B onto land that held vague kinship. My grandparents did not have a farm by any means, but my grandfather transformed their property into a sanctuary encircled by fruit and flowering trees and multiple gardens. There was a familiar stewardship of space that reached out to me as my classmates and I toured the farm’s grounds.

Visits like these were an interactive lesson designed to teach us where our food came from. They only helped strengthen the farm-to-table connection that was being eroded by product industrialization. In my adolescence, I became educated on where my food came from through gardening with my grandfather, trips to grocery stores, and regular consumption of books and television. Yet this was undercut by advertisements hailing more attractive ways to consume the prepared versions of my favorite foods.

Now innovation and industrialization has taken its toll. Every few days on Twitter a viral tweet circulates that begins: “I was today years old when I learned—.” Most often, it has to do with learning some obscure piece of information, but for a few months in the coronavirus pandemic, it seemed like every tweet was about a person learning that their favorite canned fruits weren’t manufactured and actually grew on trees, or that sunflower seeds came from sunflowers, or that strawberries house their seeds on the outside of their fruiting bodies. These conversations reminded me of a grade-school teacher who claimed that most of his students didn’t know that milk came from cows. They believed it only came from the store. He tweeted this in 2019.

I had read a similar claim on other social media platforms the year before and the year before that. It was practically an urban legend.

I did not realize how important it was to maintain the connection from seed to table until I witnessed my own children’s Pavlovian response to the doorbell’s chime. It was not hard to see how they would soon forget where food came from too.

I obsessed over the elementary school’s garden. Thoughts about it crawled into my mind before I laid down to sleep. I drove past it, slow and measured, after I dropped my girls off at daycare in the mornings. When I walked the neighborhood for exercise, every route passed by the school.

Winds had ripped the banners off the building’s walls. Other banners lay half crumpled on the ground, snagged on the fence as if clinging for dear life. Trash littered the desolate parking lot. Weeds sprouted up shin-high between the sidewalk cracks. The garden was riotous.

I walked up to the gates and squinted at it. Chard grew in abundance. Possibly a few melons too. Leafy greens were hard to come by lately, yet I stared at some behind these padlocked gates. I lamented this on Twitter. A follower suggested that I break in after hours and steal the plants. I agreed but left out my fear of getting arrested just for trying to feed my family in the pandemic. I also left out the obvious fact that it was extra dangerous because I was Black—a Black woman existing in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder.

At night, I thought about what it meant to liberate those vegetables. To climb over the fence at night and dig up the garden, later parceling out the haul to myself and my neighbors. Unable to think of a reasonable solution, I continued to walk the surrounding neighborhoods each morning, always stopping by the school garden to stare at the vegetables before heading home.

I silently mourned the garden’s inevitable death. Someone has to take care of it! I shouted internally. Why doesn’t anyone else care? I was projecting far more onto the garden than I cared to admit at the time.

During one morning walk, I spied two women and a man sitting behind a folding table at the edge of the school’s parking lot. I assumed they had to be teachers. I shuffled up toward them and, standing at a distance, introduced myself and asked what they were doing. “We’re passing out Chromebooks to the students,” the man said. “The students and parents are coming here to check them out for distance learning.” I nodded. We bantered idly while every muscle in me seized into one single urge. Ask about the garden! I nodded again, this time to the left. “I was wondering if people are allowed to pick veggies from the garden. I saw some things in there that I could use.”

“I don’t think there’s anything in there,” the woman to my right replied. “No one takes care of it.”

They all agreed, and as my opportunity slipped away, I rattled off a list of all the things I believed were growing amid the weeds. The staff shrugged and the man, who introduced himself as the principal, pulled out a ring of keys and led me to the locked gates. If not for their audience, I would have clapped my hands in glee and danced around the parking lot.

The sun beat down on my neck as I pulled up stalks of chard, a struggling head of lettuce, and daisies for the dinner table. Touching the soil sparked a neglected desire in me. I had forgotten how refreshing it was to tend, how my breathing and body changed as I gardened. Back at home, I fingered the veins running across the chard’s leaves. It reminded me of my grandfather’s collard greens. I washed it and stripped it down to its bulb, saving the leaves for the evening’s dinner. I filled an empty orchid pot with spare potting soil, dug a hole, and planted the bulb. I longed to sink my hands back into the bag of dirt. But it wasn’t just my fingers. I wanted to feel dirt dusting my skin and sweat gluing my shirt to my back after a hard day of planting and tilling. My body and spirit ached to fulfill a legacy that had been handed down to me on the days I wandered the gardens with my grandfather. I pulled out every spare plant pot in my garage and filled them with soil. I handed seeds to my toddlers and, together, we planted seeds for cherry tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, and green onions.

One night in June, in the weeks after I birthed a small forest of cherry tomato plants that spanned a third of our back patio, I awoke to the sound of rain splattering against our house. It was so soft, I almost didn’t hear it as I slept, but the drip-drop on the aluminum patio roof lured me from sleep for just a moment. I fell back into my dreams smiling at the thought of the rain nourishing my plants. The next morning, I peered through the blinds in anticipation of a world no longer thirsting. I couldn’t wait to crack open the window and smell the rain. Instead, dust still caked the edges of everything. The ground was hard and dry. It had only been a dream. But after I dreamed of a rainstorm one night in July, I knew then that a deeper part of myself was craving cleansing and restoration.

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The air conditioner could wait. My husband and I hired a landscaping service to do what we could not. They laid sod and built a brick planter. They installed an irrigation system and planted flowering vines we’d picked out at the nursery. I could not have pepper trees, but at the lead landscaper’s suggestion, we added two bottle trees. A mix-up left us with two smaller, empty planters by our back gate. I filled one with my rescued chard that had grown to the size of a small bush.

The backyard felt different. Even in the hundred-degree weather of Las Vegas it was cooler in our little cut of the earth. While my kids trailed me around the yard, I got to work. I hauled bags of soil from the garage to the yard. I slashed them open and spilled their insides into the planters.

As the weeks churned, I weeded and watered, transplanted and trimmed. I marveled at the tenacity of the plants and held their sharp aromatic leaves to my children’s noses as I described their stages of growth. In an ideal world, I would have had several bountiful harvests, but the ground rebelled at times and insects blighted many of the plants. My cherry tomatoes yielded one red-orange body that I held in my fingertips and murmured prayers over until I pulled it free of its vine and popped it in my mouth.

I spend much of my time in the backyard now. Watering allows me to pour my frustrations with the world into the ground. The gentleness I show my plants is the gentleness I crave in my own life. I hold their fragrant leaves and push myself into them, through them. The flowers bow their yellow heads into my palm. They are bright stars signaling the potential new birth of a universe of greens and ripe reds. I shuck off my shoes and wiggle my toes in the cool grass. With nothing left to do, I lie down on the green bed of my haven and stare up at the sky.

DW McKinney is a Black American writer living in Nevada. She pens a column, 3 PANELS, about life and graphic novels for CNMN Mag. She is also a BIPOC Editorial Fellow with Shenandoah Literary and a senior nonfiction editor with Raising Mothers. Say hello at dwmckinney.com.