June 21, 2018
A gardener’s meditation: we open a door to companionship when we dwell in the living land
A GARDEN IS A LONG WORK
Yes, you can turn soil, plant seeds, harvest in that same fall. In that sense, to grow a garden is a simple task, unskilled labour: weed a little, watch the water, wait on the season, and done. Gardening, though, is more than this. It is the communion of human and plant, a conversation. Scientifically, we could talk of microbe, mycelium, symbiosis, processes; poetically, we could speak with the living soul of a place. Gardening, our words are literally fruit and flower, placement of stone, allowances for those we identify either as weed or volunteer.
Gardening, we open a door to companionship with the living land.
I come from long lines of gardeners, who brought themselves to open that door, not as some high-minded esoteric communion, but to feed their own children.
FIVE YEARS
My grandmother came to Canada in 1928, leaving behind the turmoil of martial-law-era Poland, and bringing four young children, the youngest a baby. Her brother had emigrated to St. Louis, and so she’d heard that life across the ocean was possible and positive. Great Uncle Tony was a barber. As for Grandma, she was a farmwife. So her family became part of the wave of Slavic farmers invited by the Canadian government to turn “free, unused” land into a northern breadbasket. And, as I’d glean from my mom’s telling, it was bread that finalized their decision to leave Poland.
Here’s the story, as I understand it.
Under the regime of Marshal Piłsudski, Poland was lurching toward totalitarianism. Soldiers were everywhere. Farms were being forcibly collectivized. My grandparents were landowners, but now, Grandpa was pressed into service in a fieldwork group charged with meeting government quotas and schedules.
While he was in the fields, Grandma ran the household, as ever. I picture her, strong, lively, hazel eyes bright in youth, curly dark hair held in an embroidered floral scarf. She would have had already the air of quiet steadiness that was her quintessence. She’d already buried her first-born daughter, taken by pneumonia at the age of two. She’d nursed her mother- and father-in-law, lost in the 1918 influenza epidemic, and helped her husband raise his orphaned younger sisters.
She had three other young ones at home. I imagine she was pregnant, or else my second eldest aunt was a tiny baby. Either way, Grandma was a busy woman.
That day, she was making bread. Can you see the wooden bread bowl, large and plain, smooth inside with use and the working of lard or butter into the grain? Can you see her capable, efficient hands, moving sure in the dance of kneading dough?
Suddenly, soldiers arrived. Her husband had fallen ill in the field, and now she must replace him. Imagine the young mother protesting, that she had work enough making this precious bread to feed her family.
The soldiers simply overturned the bowl, the round of hopeful dough spilled in a dumb mound in the dust of the yard. The story didn’t come with any details beyond that one act. They turned her bread out on the ground, and forced her to go to the fields. The rest of what might have been said or done that day fell into the silence that has absorbed so many family histories of endurance and survival.
But that day, when their bread was thrown into the dust, they decided to leave. Those unfinished loaves raised up in them the determination to gamble on a journey across half a world.
Many years later, when I was in my late teens and Grandma in her 90s, I took my turn staying with her in her magical little house in Beaverlodge, up in northwestern Alberta. She and Grandpa had raised nine children, built a prosperous farm, lived long and healthy lives. She’d never learned to read or write, and her English was extremely limited. But Grandma was used to silence, carried whole worlds of stories unspoken. It was restful, staying with her. She accepted with quiet dignity the help she needed, and took a quiet interest in me as a person, conveyed largely without conversation. It was there in the food, which was always prodigious, as if I were fuelling up for a long day in the fields.
Should I protest that I was, in fact, stuffed like a sausage, she would offer a glimpse of her life, in her simple statement. “Eat. Too skinny. Me, young, I was 200 pounds, not fat. It’s good.”
I believed her. Up until her death at 101, she had a gorgeous incurved waist, and a liveliness that animated her sturdy limbs and broad hips with what I could easily see had been robust beauty in girlhood. Mostly, we talked like that, in brief exchanges covering the basics of our daily activities—meals, baths, medicines, bedtimes. But one day, as we sat at the little formica table finishing our mid-afternoon tea and cookie break, she turned her gaze out through the window for a moment, to where the late winter sun lay low across the snow-covered yard and the small-town bungalows.
Then she looked back at me and, in halting English, told me a story. She spoke, with heartfelt eloquence, out of decades of silence and endurance, of how cold is Canada (Kanady, she said, declining the noun according to Polish grammar). How long are the winters.
When she was a girl, she told me, by April it was spring at home. She missed the springtime, missed the gentle openness of the land of her birth. She recalled the bounty of cucumbers and strawberries, so easily flourishing there—there where she could swim in the creek at a time of year when there might still be ice in the water here. She missed the green and the flowers.
Here, she said, she was so shocked to arrive and find their farm was nothing but skinny poplars and hard, cold clay, full of rocks. It was five years, she said, before the land provided enough that she could feed her family properly.
“For five years,” she concluded, “I cried. Every day I cried. For five years.”
I TOOK A POLISH CLASS AT UNIVERSITY, BUT TOO late to learn enough to reach back to her for more stories. So, I gleaned from my mother glimpses of family history that my Grandma passed down out of her enduring quiet, to her habitually quiet youngest daughter. And I bake bread.
My mother showed me how, the calm and powerful dance of hands that asks the grain to transform into bread. The prayer that goes into the bread, the way the rising bread reveals the will of God, and can give direction to the prayerful maker. As the bread goes, so goes the matter about which the maker prays.
I knead by hand in my turn, and teach my daughter and nieces the way of it. Whatever their world looks like when they are women, they will know this connection. Now, when I set bread, it is a way to tell back, without words, some of the story, and to honour my grandmother. For five years, my grandmother, learning to convince this hard, cold, dark land to open for her, to offer up grain that would answer her call and transform into the staff of life, bringing health and well-being to her family.
WALK LIGHTLY
As for my Indigenous paternal family, the roots of connection to land had been seared and cauterized in so many joints. You can see it in the thickened waist, that telltale stress-marker of starvation and trauma, passed down into phenotype.
Grandma wore it gloriously, the bear’s body and round face. I have her crescent-moon eyes, hear her low laugh in my sister’s. And I keep a picture of her and her sister in the garden, popping up among hollyhocks, grown women laughing among the mill-town houses of Sault Ste. Marie, pre-Bill C-31, when Grandpa’s death and her subsequent remarriage meant she had to live off-reserve. She, too, had to come to Canada, an exile in her own land.
Morbidly heavy, Grandma’s ankles remained trim and elegant, her feet high-arched, like her son’s, who could carry his 300-plus pounds across a wooden floor soundlessly in a glide. In the garden, he glided after Mom, a bear with a hoe making holes for potatoes. I wonder if he ever thought about these Turtle Island roots, potatoes potatl, evidence of trade routes intercontinental. Potato histories, and the naming of the three sisters (corn, beans, squash) were women’s knowledge, though. In our garden, my mother’s lineages ran, yes, to potatoes—kartofle—but also to onion, carrot, bean, pea, and beet. Dad didn’t have Anishinabek garden lore, but he passed on how to walk with respect, treading light upon Earth. Like many Indigenous men, he came to Canada in service, in the army, and through that, travelled far.
My own first, biggest journey, from farm to city, came in the spring of 1985. I took the bus. My dad took the air ambulance, and died in hospital on my first day of work. “Go to university,” he’d said. So, the land of the Mighty Peace behind me, I needed to ground myself in Edmonton. Here, I’d go to university, seeking to prove it would be the gate connecting me to the world tugging at my dreams.
In my first autumn, walking to class, I’d pass through the legislature grounds, where the German groundskeeper would always greet me, and happily spend a few minutes talking about all the amazing things in this biggest ornamental garden I’d ever seen. One day, he was putting the flowerbeds down for winter. Do you want these geraniums? They are still good, they can overwinter inside, you know. Though I could not find enough light in my basement apartment for that flower to survive, neither could I refuse his gift of recognition, claiming me.
It was gardeners who sustained me in those first seasons, whether that German master giving me roots, and complaining about the folly of trying to force indigenous trees into European shapes, or the Italians in their downtown yards, greeting me as I walked by.
My first job was hot-walking racehorses at Northlands, and I didn’t know I should be frightened of walking through the inner city to get to the track. Those men who slowed down, or offered me rides, were no more than bewildering creeps, irrelevant. To me, the walk was full of gardens, and of steady, kind people at their work.
After that summer, it would be 15 years before I returned to central Edmonton, this time to make a family home of my own in an old house with a rubble-filled backyard. I looked at that yard, and thought of my grandmothers.
We are still coming to Canada.
GIFTS
I bring long roots, much transplanted, many times starved by drought and shrivelled by frost, beaten, cut and hammered, squeezed by the power plays of forces far beyond them, these roots remain, and they are in my garden now. Gete Okosomin is in my garden, gift of deep friends who were given the seeds at a feast. This squash, only lately named, and for a while given a fairy tale origin, has been grown on Turtle Island for a millennium, quietly, without fanfare. Another old staple, Askipaw, grows in my garden too. I planted Jerusalem artichokes before I knew they were indigenous. I know what to call them now because I asked another neighbour, a Cree Elder and scholar of the oldest stories.
In my garden, these ones remind me that Indigenous people, cultures, ways of being, like all good things, have proven incredibly resilient. These ones grow easily,grow strong.
So do saskatoon, raspberry, ode’imini, valiant grapes, queen peonies, Nanking cherries, and the scion of a plum another Cree neighbour quietly coaxed into magnificence across the street. In my garden, indigenous and immigrant plants all burl along together. I have walking onions, and overachieving chives. Yet another Cree neighbour gave me horseradish root and, every fall, I harvest it thinking of Japan.
In Japan, I haunted temple grounds, my home too small and lightless for plants; and I leapt at a volunteer weekend harvesting imo-mountain potatoes. A stranger on the dragon’s back edge of the farthest east, I felt myself connected to my new friends through work my grandmother and her grandmothers would recognize, laughing together in the fields, bringing in the harvest, food and song around an evening fire.
Horseradish is not wasabi, but it is perfectly content to shoulder up through the worst remaining patch of yard and it, too, challenges the palate. Across the yard, lilac, the sweetness I always wanted, now grows, a Mother’s Day present from my husband and child, and she is every bit as beautiful as I always knew her to be. I had to travel around the world before I found my husband and home; and it was here in Edmonton, as I read a poem about dandelions, that I first met him. So we embrace dandelions, both for that memory and for their powerful gifts. They’re overbold and profligate, yes; but eat their flowers, crowns and roots and you come to see their worth. As they are willing to be here, let us find ways to work with them. That’s a gardener’s truth.
It was my mother most of all who taught me to look in the garden for truths. Also for slugs. She came to live with us when she broke her hip, revealing the deadly cancer in her bones. She was no city person, but Edmonton was her necessary home for a while. I am forever grateful to have had the means to help care for her. Most of all, I am grateful that my garden could be there for her, and that it has known her care.
Most people saw her as gentle, but I know my mother was fierce. Even broken, she took it upon herself to fight for me and mine. In the early summer mornings, she would make her way down through the garden, setting, checking and emptying the tin cans of beer, with which she (a lifetime teetotaller) waged war on the slugs.
Now she has gone to her rest, and after 30 years, I am becoming one of the old Edmonton gardeners who smile and wave at youth.
This summer, our new Syrian neighbours knocked at my back gate, asking in their limited English if I could spare some grape leaves. This garden has made me wealthy. Sharing it brings more riches; Fatima makes the best stuffed grape leaves, and we recognize each other. She has travelled a long distance, coming to Canada, carrying stories she may never tell me.
Where language lacks, the garden speaks; what we tend will grow.
GIFTS
I bring long roots, much transplanted, many times starved by drought and shrivelled by frost, beaten, cut and hammered, squeezed by the power plays of forces far beyond them, these roots remain, and they are in my garden now. Gete Okosomin is in my garden, gift of deep friends who were given the seeds at a feast. This squash, only lately named, and for a while given a fairy tale origin, has been grown on Turtle Island for a millennium, quietly, without fanfare. Another old staple, Askipaw, grows in my garden too. I planted Jerusalem artichokes before I knew they were indigenous. I know what to call them now because I asked another neighbour, a Cree Elder and scholar of the oldest stories.
In my garden, these ones remind me that Indigenous people, cultures, ways of being, like all good things, have proven incredibly resilient. These ones grow easily,grow strong.
So do saskatoon, raspberry, ode’imini, valiant grapes, queen peonies, Nanking cherries, and the scion of a plum another Cree neighbour quietly coaxed into magnificence across the street. In my garden, indigenous and immigrant plants all burl along together. I have walking onions, and overachieving chives. Yet another Cree neighbour gave me horseradish root and, every fall, I harvest it thinking of Japan.
In Japan, I haunted temple grounds, my home too small and lightless for plants; and I leapt at a volunteer weekend harvesting imo-mountain potatoes. A stranger on the dragon’s back edge of the farthest east, I felt myself connected to my new friends through work my grandmother and her grandmothers would recognize, laughing together in the fields, bringing in the harvest, food and song around an evening fire.
Horseradish is not wasabi, but it is perfectly content to shoulder up through the worst remaining patch of yard and it, too, challenges the palate. Across the yard, lilac, the sweetness I always wanted, now grows, a Mother’s Day present from my husband and child, and she is every bit as beautiful as I always knew her to be. I had to travel around the world before I found my husband and home; and it was here in Edmonton, as I read a poem about dandelions, that I first met him. So we embrace dandelions, both for that memory and for their powerful gifts. They’re overbold and profligate, yes; but eat their flowers, crowns and roots and you come to see their worth. As they are willing to be here, let us find ways to work with them. That’s a gardener’s truth.
It was my mother most of all who taught me to look in the garden for truths. Also for slugs. She came to live with us when she broke her hip, revealing the deadly cancer in her bones. She was no city person, but Edmonton was her necessary home for a while. I am forever grateful to have had the means to help care for her. Most of all, I am grateful that my garden could be there for her, and that it has known her care.
Most people saw her as gentle, but I know my mother was fierce. Even broken, she took it upon herself to fight for me and mine. In the early summer mornings, she would make her way down through the garden, setting, checking and emptying the tin cans of beer, with which she (a lifetime teetotaller) waged war on the slugs.
Now she has gone to her rest, and after 30 years, I am becoming one of the old Edmonton gardeners who smile and wave at youth.
This summer, our new Syrian neighbours knocked at my back gate, asking in their limited English if I could spare some grape leaves. This garden has made me wealthy. Sharing it brings more riches; Fatima makes the best stuffed grape leaves, and we recognize each other. She has travelled a long distance, coming to Canada, carrying stories she may never tell me.
Where language lacks, the garden speaks; what we tend will grow.
The Truth is in the Dirt by Anna Marie Sewell originally ran in the Canada150 issue of Eighteen Bridges magazine, which was a special collection of essays commissioned for Edmonton Community Foundation’s (ECF) High Level Lit project — a partnership between ECF, Eighteen Bridges, and LitFest. The published collection of these essays was awarded Best Editorial Package of the Year at the 2017 Alberta Magazine Publishers Association Awards and was instrumental in Eighteen Bridges being named Magazine of the Year at those same awards. The project was also nominated for two National Magazine Awards, including Omar Mouallem’s essay Homeland for the Holidays, which won gold in the Personal Journalism category. To mark Canada’s 151st anniversary of Confederation, ECF is making digital versions of these stories available to the public.