The Cherished Root

In my mothers garden grows a weed. The weed is some sort of wild carrot with a tap root the size of a root vegetable and pure white. My mother has never identified this weed but considers it the bane of her gardening experience. She has reaped the soil of our front yard home for 31 years and counting. At one point it was a lawn surrounded by a white picket fence. Parts of the lawn were flower beds. Later in my childhood there was a vegetable patch and stalky, spiny tomato plants ripe for the picking. For the last 10 years or so it has become an art installation, a cacophony of flowers, pottery, old chairs and plant dreams. Elves for sure live in this place as well as stalks of peppermint, black eyed Susan's and  the largest, brightest bulb flowering I have ever seen in a tiny square patch. The garden is full of love and eccentricities, like my mother. It is an effort of community that keeps her out there making a patch of beauty on our pretty New England street. It is messy and youthful, full of bright color and mystery.



For the past two years I have had the privilege of clearing her flag stone path through the middle of it. There is nothing like getting down in the dirt with long, slimy, worms and the fragrance of peppermint filling my nose as I work. Sweetpea joins me, picking the petals off the black eyes Susan's, studying the worms I dig up and helping bag all the grasses I pull up. She gets the sensual experience of weeding a path, she can probably see the fairy lands created under the ark of Iris stalks. My wish for our family is to have a similarly crazy, well attended garden. A small farm with plants that grow along side us. I want to find my unidentified wild carrot root, the one, like an old familiar friend that keeps coming back to remind me of this place. The place that I can call mine, the place that is home.

We are on this journey, finding a bit of land to tend for awhile. The tides of change are upon us once again and the red, shaken, earth of Oklahoma is calling. My dream is to plant fruit trees and tend them to maturity, to create an eco system that supports the little wild things of a city neighborhood. To be able to teach, learn and grow with Gaia. Every place I have lived in my young adult life has had a garden of some type. I want to see soil go past its two year mark in maturing and come to its own. I want to see the land bust out magnificent food for us to live on.

I will find my cherished root, I just have to keep believing in it.