The Garlic of Canceled Things
This story appears in M/U’s 2020 spiritual writing anthology, Spiritus Oppidum, Vol. 1. To read this alongside the other brilliant pieces included in the collection, you can obtain paperback and PDF copies in our store, with Kindle versions available on Amazon.
Another Halloween that Won’t Be
Last year, our town canceled Halloween because of the threat of a storm that never came. The kids and I took this opportunity to plant garlic. Dashing outside furtively, certain that the tempest was imminent, we cobbled together the first garden bed at our new house, four uneven logs on a slanted bit of ground. I pulled the cloves off the bulbs grown by their grandfather and let the wild wind carry away the papery covering. We tucked the biggest ones into the ground and covered them with leaves that blew out of our hands and across the bare fill that made up our new backyard. We lay sticks down to keep the mulch in place. Soon winter took over the job, obscuring the whole project in snow. Underneath the snow, the leaves, the dirt, the garlic grew.
This year, my father-in-law Jack did not plant garlic in his own little garden by the sea, opting for a retirement from allium growing at age 93. Learning this was as much of a disappointment as any of the usual events and celebrations that have been canceled.
I’ve been planting clones of his garlic since I lived by myself, for the only time as an adult, in a Boston attic apartment, the best feature of which was its balcony. From up there I could see from Jamaica Plain all the way to West Roxbury, the tops of trees stretching before me a green boulevard in the sky. I grew a riotous, ridiculous garden on that balcony, tending everything from okra to grapevines to peach trees in 5-gallon buckets and weird plastic bins I swiped from the alleys behind little stores in Roslindale center. I tucked Jack’s garlic cloves into window boxes and bare patches of potting soil next to basil then, and it was this new crop of Jack’s garlic that was the very first thing we planted at our Peterborough house ten years later.
How many years had he been planting clones of the same plants, I wonder?
Garlic heads are usually grown from garlic cloves - there’s no sexual selection involved. It’s possible to grow garlic from seed, if you sacrifice the curly scapes and let them unfurl and flower. This takes longer, though, and garlic is so hardy and well-adapted that there’s not much need. This, in contrast to a potato, which could be similarly perennialized in a home garden but for the tendency to collect viruses. Keep planting a few of your potatoes each year, and the quality will decline rapidly. Garlic, though, theoretically only improves. Its gene expression shifts to match the exact conditions of the soil in which it is placed.
This means the same individuals who once flapped their strappy green leaves in the Atlantic breeze and reached for the sun above the treetops of Boston suburbs have now found their way to a sunny patch of cleared forest in New Hampshire. This garlic has a family history, a heritage. And this year’s first sprout emerged the same weekend the news of Covid closings crashed down on us. We fertilized the shoots with composted bedding left to us from a massacred flock of chickens. The harvest was small, drought-strained. Loss and cancelation are in this garlic’s astrological chart. What will it become as we continue its legacy, pulling its genes forward through the seasons?
It’s almost time to plant for next year, on another Halloween that won’t be. And Jack’s garden remains a patch of tangled weeds, soon to fade into grass and scrubby oceanside shrubs. All we can do is put the garlic in the ground anyway, give it our best care, and trust.
Victory Gardens
In April, during the darkest part of my personal despair, I planted trees around the garlic bed. When I would find myself lying on the couch paralyzed by a depressive cloud, I’d force myself to get up and plant a tree. When I ran out of trees to plant, I dragged too-heavy pieces of logs across the ground to stake out vegetable plots. That first fall garlic patch became just one section of a sprawling garden.
Growing a garden has long been a kind of spiritual practice for me, a way of connecting with the cycles of the year, with agricultural heritage. Things grow, with astonishing abundance. A deep appreciation for the resilience of life in the face of obstacles is the minimum even a terrible gardener might expect to harvest. The abundant basil harvest, the surprise of potatoes: these are wonderful gifts, too. But generally, I feel that gardening is closer to a decorative craft that I indulge in, not something I rely on for a significant portion of my family’s food.
Gardening also intimately connects the gardener with the darker sides of nature. Growing things necessarily involves death, rot, murder, viruses. Hard choices have to be made, with ruthlessness. Things fail.
This year, I planted vegetables I swore I had no interest in growing: corn, tomatoes. I bought broccoli and brussels sprout seedlings. I wasn’t the only one who was frantically planting - the shortages of seeds and starter plants were widespread and noticeable in a spring when everyone was home.
Yet as the season went on, memes about victory gardens and talks of homesteading circulated. Everyone was growing things, and for reasons very different than my own. I heard ambitious planting plans from friends and strange assumptions that growing a garden meant removing oneself from the unspecified evils of the food supply chain. A few people started talking about gardening as something we were collectively obligated to do, a single act with which we could mitigate climate change, eliminate fraught Covid-era grocery store trips, and just generally become better people. Comparisons to the Victory Gardens of WWII were made, but only the growing-as-duty part, not the part where most people abandoned the hard work as soon as they could afford to.
To be fair, my thinking about gardening has changed a lot. Ten years ago, I did dream of a homestead on which I would grow all of my future family’s food. I devoured books and charts that showed just how much land I would need to meet our calorie needs, how many row-feet of green beans one should plant for a family of four, how to be self-sufficient.
Back then, self-sufficiency was a goal meant to take me closer to a life totally in line with my values, eliminating all grey areas and inconsistencies of thought. Removing cognitive dissonance from my experience was a stated goal of mine. If I could totally opt out from all the ugly things happening in the world by not driving, eating vegan, growing all my own food - then that seemed like the right thing to do, the path to true happiness.
The whole concept of cognitive dissonance and how one lives with it has always been a struggle for me, and this year has brought my intolerance for inconsistency in thought raging to the foreground. I’ve remarked often that something about 2020 brings out this angry adolescent side of me I believed I had abandoned - and only recently have I been able to articulate it in this way. When I was younger, perceived hypocrisy was intolerable. I couldn’t understand how people who swore they loved animals could then eat them; how people stayed with partners they didn’t like; how people parroted poorly-thought, superficial political opinions. I wondered how they could stand themselves. Didn’t their brains and hearts ache all the time?
It turns out that life requires a certain level of comfort with some background dissonance. But the discourse around Covid and the election have brought out those ugly dragons within me, rearing their heads. There have been days when I’ve wondered who is going to remain to be friends with when all the inconstant fools are cut out.
When the autumn equinox came with its physical embodiment of dissonance, I was humbled and tempered. It’s this time of year when nature completely abandons us. The gardens are empty and dead save for a hardy kale or parsley. Trees are becoming ever more bare. Animals are fleeing for warmer places. And yet we humans can’t just stop and take the winter off. We have to get stronger just as nature is fading so we can kindle our own inner fires to keep us going during the cold times.
The festival of Michaelmas, as interpreted by Rudolf Steiner, the German philosopher and founder of Waldorf education, comes just after the equinox to remind us of our inner warmth, to celebrate the fact that we have the power to resist the call to senescence all around us, to encourage us to fend off those dragons that call us away from connection. As I was preparing celebrations for this festival for both my UU church and for the groups of kids I spend my days with, I was reminded of lessons already hard-learned: we can’t escape the fact that life doesn’t always make sense. We kill to live. Nature is cruel and history is bloody and love is only sometimes fair. People, myself included, do monstrous things as well as beautiful. Nobody can just opt out of the uncomfortable pieces of life, no matter how pious or self-righteous we might try to be.
Somehow this year, living in a soup of other people’s cognitive dissonance that had me raging and despairing, the simple celebration of the arrival of fall helped me transform that anger. All of life is grey, even the most innocently-conceived vegetable garden. But we are the light, if we just kindle it. The light inside us can be the constant, no matter what is swirling around out there.
The contrast between the inner and outer worlds is stark right now, but this isn’t hypocrisy - this is inspiration.
White Pine Angels
My opinion about white pines has also changed drastically. In our old farmhouse in Francestown, I had a nemesis pine, a huge, unrestrained monster looming over the south corner of the house. If not for this tree, I’d think, so much more sun could reach us. We could grow more. Everything would be better. I calculated the best angle for it to fall, and dreamed of one day witnessing its death.
This tree also represented white pines as a species - useless at best, I decided. Looming and hulking over everything and not even providing so much as a nut.
Not to mention that come fall, pines don’t actually stay stoic and evergreen. They yellow and drop a bunch of needles, but in a way that makes them all look sick and not beautiful.
One winter, we had our woods logged. I cheered on the removal of so many members of this detested species, but the foresters pardoned the looming monster due to its proximity to roads and power lines. Why they hadn't just taken them all, made space for better things? Wouldn’t the forest be so much more useful without all these pines in the way?
We moved away from that gnarled wolf pine to a suburban lot bristling with spindly ones. To my delight, we had to clear out most of them for a new septic system. The ones left on the edges of our half-acre, providing a little privacy, I merely tolerated.
One evening, I heard an unexpected clatter of twigs and looked up into those high treetops to discover turkeys roosting. They were so far up they looked to be barely more than dark humps on the branches. I already felt acquainted with the flock that ranged through our neighborhood, but I hadn’t yet noticed that they were sleeping in our trees. The next evening, when several of the turkeys assembled in the yard across the street, I watched as they ran, picked up speed, and, unbelievably, flew - right over our house and up into the pines.
Astonishing. I’d had chickens for years and knew they could get up into a low branch or onto a roost with considerable effort, but I could never picture them flying over a house. The turkeys had the advantage of wildness, of course, but their bodies seemed even less designed for flight, much more suited to a life of ground-level seed-eating.
I was also awed by the pines themselves. I wouldn’t have imagined the scraggly cover of those trees to provide shelter for any creature. But not only did those rickety, creaking branches make fine beds for friendly turkeys, they induced the miraculous flying in order to claim them.
Sometime in the first weeks of Covid, my pantry stocked, children’s acetaminophen and cold medicine and disinfecting spray and gloves acquired, everything I could materially DO having been DONE, I decided I needed to get out of the house before we would be required to stay there. I took the kids for a short hike, up behind the closed and locked Adams Playground, up a steep path to some rocks I had only just noticed from below a few weeks prior.
This was the height of my anxiety, my many long hours of doomscrolling through news headlines, and I felt completely untethered. While the kids clambered around the rocks up on the hill, I sat and tried to meditate or pray or something, whatever I could do to get a grip on my spiraling thoughts. Memes about the terrifying multi-eyed, many-winged angels of the Bible along with their introductory phrase “Be Not Afraid” had been circulating, and I was trying to slip those words into the cracks of my fear like a pry bar.
We were completely surrounded by gigantic white pines on the hill, their huge straight trunks making up almost the entirety of the patch of forest we were in. My appreciation for pines had only increased since the turkey discovery some months before, and I had begun to admire other positive things about them, such as the way the sunset rays catch their needles last in certain places and light them up with gold-orange fire. Or the scale pattern of their bark, or the flower-bursts of their cones.
On this day, the looming quality that I had previously turned me off felt instead like a solid positive presence. The height of the pines felt soaring rather than spindly. I felt comfort from those trees. They stood there just existing, just reaching up to the sun, echoing “Be Not Afraid” back at me. You’re just a tiny forest creature, they seemed to say, and this is just the next thing that’s happening.
When I looked up at them, it was almost like their needles were the feathers covering the many wings of the coniferous host.