Winter squash, bulb onions, and carrots

gardening to cure a homeless heart

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This is the ritual.

Cut the corn stalks. Cure the pumpkins and winter squash. Tie the onion tops in intricate braids, each bulb overlapping, hoping you won't bruise one. Check for tooth marks in the apples. Turn the soil and pull out another twenty pounds of spuds for stews and pot roasts and hash browns. Mourn the unripened figs still clinging to the summer branches of a tree that never gets to finish what it started.

Frown at the paths sprouting new weeds, the tough kind that want you to ignore them so they can trip you midwinter. Loosen the soil or the carrots will hug it tightly and shed their tops like a lizard tail. (If you don't know that one, you might have been in indoor kid, or maybe you grew up without backyard lizards.) Leave the falling sunflower heads as long as possible. They're not for the asshole acrobat squirrel eating their seeds while hanging by his back toes and performing the perfect calisthenic curl to get another seed–they’re for the last of the bees, their buzzing a reminder that winter means hibernation, torpor, and death.

It's not that kind of death, it’s the so-glad-I-can-finally-stop kind of death we all yearn for when our bodies tell us the sky is darkening, that evening is coming sooner, that we should check the kindling in the woodshed and split more on the next cold day.

Okay, so some of that death is literal.

Mushrooms are fruiting in the lawn. The hops flowers hang heavy on velcro vines, and more than a few things are still trying to flower and fruit in the face of The End. I mean… zucchini, right? Talk about not knowing when to quit.

If you tug just firmly enough when you yank a potato vine, you might pull half the tubers right out of the soil. And I will never understand how the rocks grow so well in those beds. I swear I didn’t plant them last year, and yet I always need one box for spuds, one pot for rocks, and another bin for weeds and leaves and compost. The rock bin gives the spud box a run for its weight every time.

You can tell that I accidentally-on-purpose left the parsley to flower one year because now it’s sprouting up all over the yard, front and back, and it smelled a bit like pot roast the last time I used the mower. Yes, I still have grass. No, I haven’t won that battle with my wife yet. Don’t worry—I have a plan.

Bury the garlic cloves two knuckles deep—push, cover, pat, as my youngest would say. His technique is a delight to watch.

Beware the oversized slugs by late afternoon. They’re in charge now. And the world needs detrivores. From piles of leaves, woodchips, plant debris, forgotten cabbages, and rhubarb leaves comes the soil of next year, the nutrition and moisture-holding, the fluffy rootzone, home to carrots or broccoli or onions.

Tie up the new raspberry canes. You’ll thank me in the spring. Cut the strawberry runners or guide them along neat rows. Run your hands across the cover crop, its vibrant green a sacrifice in the first hard frost, a blanket of decay under layers of snow to come. It’ll regrow. It’ll provide a home to critters you’ll never see. It’ll cause problems if any of those critters are mice or rats, but this is their world, too, so get over those squeamish feelings.

I once sat in a meeting of P-Patch renters, part of a Seattle program that’s still going strong to this day, and an attendee complained loudly about the need for a fence and a gate and a lock, because carrots. Carrots were getting stolen. His carrots. There was a chorus of agreement. They sang hymns of “my garden is not for the homeless” as I listened, paralyzed by fear and shame. I should have stood and said thank you, thank you for the carrots. Because I stole them once upon a time, and maybe the ones I took belonged to him. But they fed me, and they kept me going for another day.

I was the mouse. I was the rat. I was the squirrel and the slug and the worm. I was the bird in the plum tree, beak slick with juice. I was the groundhog, sneaky and quick, hiding in the dark, nibbling fallen apples. I was the rabbit, always eating pea shoots down to the nub so that they couldn’t grow taller for anyone.

I was trouble.

But trouble gets hungry, too, and the world needs our appetite so that it remembers to grow for us. All these rituals of autumn are a celebration of success and failure for another year, another larder, another full pantry. This unfathomable wealth is still out of reach for that hungry thing I once was, and I think of that version of myself every autumn when I count the winter squash and dry the shelling beans. And for them I leave the garden gate open, the carrots vulnerable. For them I don’t rush to harvest all the ripe peppers. For them I will celebrate the cold days, the decay, the warmth of fires I will build, the comfort of tea made with my own hops and chamomile.

Maybe it takes a whole lifetime to recover from things like being homeless, but this garden of mine is the one place where I can both feel and attend to that hurt. There will never be enough. I know that now. This is a hole that cannot be filled with carrots or apples or any kind of food, but I come back to the symbol of it every year to try.

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It’s hard to talk about experiencing homelessness. Lots of us have opinions about homeless people, about the reasons or the backgrounds or how we feel looking at homelessness from the outside, but less often we see the stories of those of us who lived outside, who begged or stole or broke laws to survive. By sharing my own stories of being a homeless teen and young adult I can break that cycle of ignorance and blame. Thanks for listening and for being open to change your mind and your feelings about the next homeless person you meet.

Your trans friend,

Robin