The title is dramatic, but it has felt like a dramatic time to garden, a time of heightened awareness of evil in the world and hopefully a midnight or turning point of sorts.
A month ago yesterday George Floyd was murdered by police on a corner a half mile from my house.
In fact two hours before they kneeled on his neck I drove past that corner with my daughter in the back seat after a muggy hour prepping my community garden plot at Sabathani Community Garden Center.
Like most people I learned about the killing the next morning on my phone. I went to the protest at the corner that evening. People streamed past my house for an hour beforehand, walking that direction. That protest went on for hours that night, and then days, and weeks. You still can't drive through that intersection because, thankfully, community is holding the space, filling it daily with art, music, flowers, prayer, dance, food, gardens, while actions and protest continue to be organized there and around the city. But in the weeks just after his death helicopters were circling overhead constantly, and as protests escalated, smoke filled the air from nightfall to mid-morning for days and tanks roamed my neighborhood and guarded the Sabathani parking lot, adjacent to a the closest fire-station to the murder-site.
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| Garden planted in the street at 38th and Chicago |
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| The view from my garden plot gate (Nat'l guard) |
This being late May I had a yard full of seedlings just hardening off after weeks being coddled under basement grow lights. I practically threw them into the ground in the midst of that week between protests and community protection events, knowing they'd be safer in the earth than their little trays under the picnic table if the fires spread or the rumored gangs of white supremacists came through our alleys or we just had to be elsewhere for days at a time, helping, not gardening.
Maybe it was the mud I slopped on their leaves in my haste, or that I rushed their hardening off, or that I'd already skipped my annual early spring truckload of compost amid the COVID shutdown, making do instead with some bags of composted manure, but for weeks after, everything looked terrible. Just in the last week the cucurbits and peppers have turned a corner from small and yellow to happy and green, but the tomatoes are so frail I'm not sure they'll produce. And while it's a bit depressing, it's probably just about right for the times. I'll try to keep the garden just good enough to hold my heart, and save my worries for whether I'm being a good enough citizen/activist/participant in making the world. I'll also try not to feel bad about what time I do put into it. The garden feeds us, in more ways than one, and we need our souls in good shape to make the world right.
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