Dirt That Was Never Not Holy

I walk through the garden as the hazy fog of sunrise begins to evaporate in the quickly rising heat. Heavy eggplants weigh down the branches of their mother plants, and the trusses of cherry tomatoes shine jewel-bright among the wild green of theirs. I notice massive zucchinis long past their optimal harvest time , the tell-tale sign that I’m tired of eating a thing. The cucumber leaves have gone crisp in the heat of June, and the remaining fruits are huge and yellowing, ripening the seeds for next season.

It is peak summer, and my garden is at her finest.

I check the peach tree daily, waiting for the first sign of blushing on the peach-fuzz skin of my favorite white variety. They are the best peaches I’ve ever had and the tree produced none last year, having fallen victim to beetles. This year, though, her branches are full and my anticipation is high. It’s been twenty-three months and two weeks since I last sat underneath that tree, eating. Twenty-three months and two weeks since I polished off my third peach in a row for breakfast and lay back in the grass, realizing I'd never really known what a peach could taste like.

The basil is all trying to bloom. Huge basil plants, bushy from my attentive pruning, spanning a full yardstick wide in my raised beds. Lemon basil, cinnamon, purple opal. Lettuce leaf basil with its leaves as large as my face, lacy and lovely, sweet basil and the more medicinally flavored Italian one. I’ve been making batches of basil tea, here and there, bringing in a handful of leaves for spaghetti or caprese. But this week, I picked out two big chunks of Pecorino Romano at the grocery and brought them home along with a large bag of walnuts. Batches of pesto will be added to the freezer, a snapshot of basil season to take me back as the weather turns cold.

I’m swimming in tomatoes. I harvested over a hundred pounds this week and another hundred are blushing at me from their waving vines. A gorgeous array of colors, intermingled among the branches and the basils and the huge Jurassic looking squash leaves. Thorburn’s robust terracotta flesh and Aunt Ruby’s verdant green skin and Blue Beauty’s deep purple shoulders. God, they’re gorgeous.

Last night, we walked through the rows at sunset, and I plucked a dark red fruit that filled my palm, as dusky as the evening light. I bit it like an apple, luxuriously, hungrily. Seeds and gel dripped from the edges of my bottom lip and I quickly sucked it in, not to drip on my dress. I only ate half and threw the rest to the birds, and I did not feel wasteful.

The subject of waste, now that we've come to it, has become a delineation for me these days. When I turn the camera on in these fruitful seasons, I know by the responses who has experienced them and who has not. Those who are scandalized by half-eaten tomatoes and swollen, forgotten squash have not loved and cared for a garden like mine. The comments come steady as a drumbeat, have since I made my garden public, and I can only think the people writing them have never stood in a place like this one, where the life is entirely fueled by death.

Don’t get me wrong, I love sharing the excess. Feeding people is one of my greatest joys. In July, I fill cardboard boxes of bounty with incredible care. A palette of tomatoes, different sizes and textures, bouquets of zinnias and dahlias and bundles of herbs, small melons and soft figs and long, curved eggplants the color of spilled ink. And potatoes! Yes, always potatoes with the thin outer layers of their skins curling up from the assault of being removed from the earth, bits of their former home still clinging. All of it lovingly curated as by a sommelier, by one who has taken the time to know the relationship between flavors. I present these gifts to people I love like I’m handing them vials of my own blood, and it has, at the very least, been grown by my sweat and tears and passion.

There will come a tipping point though, somewhere near August, when I release the reins entirely. She will be fully feral then, fully given to her own destruction. The garden undoes herself, and insists on doing it, turning her entire being inside out in determination to see her seeds outlive her. This is when I will call in the backup. Texts sent by sweaty hands like an SOS signal flaring into the sky, “Do you need peppers? Come pick. I’ll never get to them all.”

But waste? Never. Waste does not exist here. In a world where energy is exchanged between sun and soil and reaching leaves, where fruit feeds earthworms and earthworms build structure and structure holds water and root systems bear witness to it all, waste is a concept that could only belong elsewhere. Surely, waste exists with price tags and barcodes and commercials, in places where people value bottom lines over the ecstasy of eating a sun warmed tomato like an apple.

Here, in a system where everything belongs and nothing truly leaves, I would feel no shame in growing the whole garden just to watch her grow, to watcher her rot and to learn the lesson of her surrender. It’s not exactly so luscious as that though. When I imagine that kind of garden, I think I’d certainly have to be naked in it. In this one, where I wear loosely flowing dresses and an apron tied around my soft waist, I collect my bits and bobs to fill my freezer and pantry, but not without first eating half a fruit whenever I feel. And I do not allow shame or guilt or worse, obligation, to convince me to be driven by anything but desire.

And I guess, I’ve realized , there's a feral, seed-bearing Truth in me that has rooted herself in the internal soil where beliefs are grown. For a long time I called her mine, the part of me that beckoned me into the garden. But the further I follow her down the rows, the less I can say where I end and she begins, because the voice that called me into this place is the same voice the ground itself obeyed. Wisdom was there before the first seed, the Word through whom the soil was spoken, delighting in the world before there was anyone in it to delight. When the abundance overwhelms me, she shushes me the way mothers do for their overwhelmed children. I follow her down the rows, slipping off my shoes, sinking to my knees in dirt that was never not holy. I thought I was following her for my survival, and in the simplest sense I was. But she was leading me somewhere stranger, into a world where even rot is abundance, where what spills from broken alabaster is never named waste.

She knew, all along, a garden is where this human belongs.