First Fruits

Let me just do the straight-forward part first.  I picked my first tomato this year, from my kind-of-drowned vines out front, on July 3.  Not sure, but I think this was from one of the heritage seed plants that Brian gave me, but I rather hastily got everything into the ground, along with 20 other plants from Westlake's, and didn't try to label or map out what was what.

But this first tomato is important for me.  In years when things go well, I'll wind up eating 5 or 6 or so tomatoes everyday through August and September, and I privately hold that tomatoes in that quantity, fresh from vine and local dirt, a red and yellow terroir,  are in themselves a fountain of youth, a pathway of health that nothing at the grocery store can mimic.  Alas, I have no proof for that.

And "when things go well"--that means not the desert air of last summer, nor really the monsoon season we've had this year, nor those little yellow and black beetles that munched a few plants to death this May while I was off in Sicily, not scrunching beetles every morning.  And we still haven't arrived at the tomato worm assault, those leaf-eating demons.
  

They'll probably show up in the next few weeks.  A disaster when I travel in August.

 

The astute gardeners among you will notice my heretical 
method--I don't worry at the weeds here and there around the vines. I pull down the giant ragweed when it blocks the sun, but I don't leave the ground bare.

Beyond tomatoes, I've recently been eating a few gooseberries every morning when I walk the dogs out in the east field.

    

 

I almost prefer them green and sour, but these are nice, even if I wind up eating a lot of stems.  And the mulberries have been on for several weeks, and continue, though I've eaten many of the ones I can reach, unless I get ladder-serious.

Why bother with such minor food sources?  Remember that dinner scene in Soylent Green, that excitement over some limp celery and a withered apple, and a questionable strip of beef? (Sol the older guy, Detective Thorn the younger.)

Sol: Son of a bitch. I haven't eaten like this in years.

Det. Thorn: I never ate like this.

Sol: And now you know what you've been missing. There was a world, once, you punk.

Det. Thorn: Yes, so you keep telling me.

Sol: I was there. I can prove it.

Det. Thorn: I know, I know. When you were young, people were better.

Sol: Aw, nuts. People were always rotten. But the world was beautiful.

We aren't quite there.  But we might be on their path:

Sol: You know. When I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil. Decimated plant and animal life. Why, in my day you could buy meat anywhere. Eggs, they had. Real butter. Fresh lettuce in the...

Det. Thorn: I know. Sol. You told me before. A heat wave all year long. A greenhouse effect. Everything is burning up.   [from wikiquotes]

That was in a rather prescient moment...in 1973.

In any case, we don't too often celebrate those moments of encountering food, those moments in the life of our food.  I'm going to drift a bit further here, to alternate celebrations.  So, this will be a stretch, unless you teach Environmental Novels (some teacher-friends do also use this book in Social Work/Human Services courses, because of its critical view of mental health procedures), but recall Marge Piercy's 1976 Woman on the Edge of Time.

   

In this novel, Connie, an impoverished Hispanic woman in our time (well, the 1970s) is battered by the social service system, and winds up in a mental institution.  She is visited, in a sort of mutual out-of-body, cross-centuries transfer, by Luciente, a woman from 2137, who lives in an ecofeminist, bioregional utopia.  They "visit" back and forth, between our "Age of Greed and Waste," and that ideal future. Among many astonishing changes (like the 3-mom parenting, madness as a positive re-grounding experience, the lack of gender boundaries, getting past all professional management and managers, a sophisticated apprenticeship-education, the fluid self-naming, community wakes, etc.), that future also has holidays, a lot of them, built around natural events, seasonal change, and mourning for the loss of our great companions, such as the whales. (That utopian future isn't set in temporal stone--Luciente's people still fight the remaining oligarchs from our era, and in spooky, creepy Chapter 15, we find a much worse, much more direct extrapolation from our times...and we perhaps won't kill off all the whales to feed self-indulgent criminal-connoisseurs in Japan, Iceland and Norway.)

Ok, so you aren't quite ready for memorial days for these recent losses--the Quagga, the Tasmania Tiger, the Passenger Pigeon, the Golden Toad, the Zanzibar Leopard, the Pinta Island Tortoise, the Vietnamese Rhino...oh, enough to have a memorial service every single day of the year...

Here's a different way to engage holidays and celebrations. We're jumping now up to 2009, with Margaret Atwood's Year of the Flood, the second book in her Maddaddam Trilogy.  (I've been making my MU freshmen read the first volume, Oryx and Crake, a decidedly grim way for them to start their college careers, but a realistic approach their future.)
 

Margaret Atwood

One fellow blogger out there in cyber-land describes The Year of the Flood this way:
 

As an antidote to consumerism, environmental conscientiousness is presented in the novel as an effective means of assuring the longevity of the Earth and of humanity as a whole. This perspective is given to us through...the God’s Gardeners, an environmental religious group. The God’s Gardeners sect is equipped with its own hymns, sermons, and a canon of saints (from Saint Francis of Assisi to Saint David Suzuki). It teaches practical survival skills that see several of the former members through the pandemic, which they refer to as the Waterless Flood. The religion’s aptness as a means of survival is one of the ways the novel validates religion as technology...[which] enhances our ability to connect with individuals with whom we might not share any commonalities besides shared beliefs. This leads to a frame of mind that is non-egocentric as well as considerate of humanity’s relationship with nature.

More than a few useful ideas to consider there, but I'm focusing on the Hymns and holidays that Atwood's God's Gardeners develop. You can actually buy those hymns set to music--one of my students downloaded and played for us:  
  

(Read more, if you wish, about How the Hymns Came to Be, a nice comment on the creative process across disciplines.)

Ursula LeGuin, a writer we ought never forget, has this to say about the hymns in The Year of the Flood:  "the hymns of the Gardeners, which are printed about every third chapter along with sermon-meditations, may be read as kindly spoofs of hippy mysticism, green fervour, and religious naivety, and at the same time can be taken quite seriously."

The Hymns themselves (this would be so much easier if I could find my copy of the book, lost somewhere amid the clean socks and piled legal pads inside, or the dirty t-shirts and sacks of dog food in the Jeep) celebrate dozens of writers and workers who have tried to reconnect us to earth and animals and food.  Ah, here's a list, with songs such as, "We praise the tiny perfect moles," "Today we praise our St. Dian [Fossey]," and "The Earth Forgives."

Beyond the Hymns, the novel is filled with holidays or remembrances of, well, folks we ought to remember, like Rachel Carson (my students resolutely don't know Rachel, after whom I named one of my now-gone dogs, which all breaks my heart. Sigh).

This sense of creating a network of memory, a calendar that links us, grounds us, is what buzzes through my head when I pay attention to these First Fruits.  But how to extend this beyond a personal scribble in my journal?  How to make First Tomato resonate with the power of Christmas or Thanksgiving?  I haven't figured this out.

 * * *

A couple weeks before my first tomato, I was (pre)thinking this, remembering neighbors down the road from my hovel who have a big party for the summer solstice every year, up there on the hill, behind that second row of creek trees.  They are inventing their own celebration and relation to the world.  Me and the dogs trespass in the dark in their front field, and have for 25 years, watching the moon, but I don't know these neighbors well enough to get myself invited.

  

later, bob

   “The powerful don’t make revolutions”

                Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time