Now I Take me Home Again

Six weeks on the road, and hungry for home and the home dirt. Coming back to our garden a few days ago raised in me a sense of purpose and place so elemental that it shocked me. It wasn’t that I’d really missed our house or the few square yards of dirt on which we’d grown quite a bit of food last summer; food that we are now pulling out of the freezer and eating, turning our backs smugly to the grocery store. Uh…Ok. So I bought a bottle of wine, some milk and some cheese.
No, I think what I felt was in some way similar to that panic that grips us when we slip into one of those school nightmares, where it’s the end of the semester, you can’t remember what time your class meets, where it meets, or what you were supposed to be doing. There’s an exam. If only you could find the room. But worse. You suddenly realize you are naked. And at the bottom of it all, nobody else cares. If you don’t show up, it’s all, and only, your loss.
It was, I think, my first glimpse of the spectre that has never been close enough to scare most of us in the Recently Rich World. Call that haunt “Grow-food-or-die”, and know that there is no panic like no seeds left to plant, or no dirt left to plant them in. But I’ve come home to house and garden. All things are right with the world. I have seeds. I have dirt. And a grocery store a mile away. What? Me worry? …Yes, thankyou. I think I will, just a little bit. It’s time to start the tomatoes, the cabbages and broccoli. It’s time to find out who in town is raising chickens. It’s time to come back to the garden.