Snails, Nails, Puppy Dog Tails And A Blue Princess Dress
We had a bunch of children over New Year’s Day. These are outside loving young-uns. Who ever says youth is all tied to technology today, hasn’t met these dirt lovers. A second grade girl, one minute in a princes dress and the next minute tricking me into smell her hands — covered in putrid, rain water and worm casting. A boy who loves to dig, and dig and dig. And dig. He loves it so much, we keep a dirt pile under the shed for him. Another boy, barefoot, looking at the insides of a walnut, crushed with a hammer, to tell me the difference between that and pecan.
“Do you want to see a cool mushroom?” I ask? YES! “Do you want to look under the dirt and find his body?” YES! Do you want to taste fennel? Parsley? Broccoli? Those yellow weed flowers? Yes, and I do too.
I know what I’m doing. Recruiting. Somebody did it for me. Will it stick? Will these children become gardeners?
Like any memory, we change them, forget them for a while, romanticize them, blur them, even resent them but we have them.
I’ve always been a dirt loving, barefoot guy. And I’ve always been around people older than me who knew what they were doing. In college, I thought I wanted to be in the corporate side of botanical gardens. But after a disillusioning weekend interviewing at the University of Delaware’s celebrated Longwood graduate program, I realized I wanted biology. I ran to J.C. Raulston, a creative, world renowned, gay man and mentor who knew me. He said, ‘I knew that, now go to Seattle, you’ll fit in ways you don’t even know.‘ Thanks J.C.
Like the Village People song says, ” Together! We will learn and teach. Together! We will change our pace of life, together we will work and strive. Go West……..”
I found my art and heart and soul and wild man and realized that I was meant to be barefoot and have dirty hands. Some guy I barely knew gave me a giant scarf, standing in the rain on some fishing pier. I still have it. I still have my friend Bruce in my life. Some guy, yes you Bobby, I met through a convoluted, network, taught me to be me. In the phraseology of the early 90s, Robert Bly men-stuff of the day, helped me find those memories of “abundant, various, and many-sided aspects of manhood, the inherited spiritual and soul powers developed centuries ago.”
Wow. I’m not sure where all that came from. Something to do with process of changing from barefoot, inquisitive child to real gardener, a conservationists, a steward of earth and with the fun and duty of creating more of the same?