I really like to plant my tomatoes out on May 15, when the cool and rainy weeks before the beginning of June get them used to the outdoors and give them stronger roots and stouter vines, and in the end larger earlier harvests. But this year, as the May 15 crept past, the nights were still in the 40s, and my tomatoes stayed in pots on the glass shelves I had built into the picture window in our living room that has the best exposure of any in our house. My runner beans got off to a late start in the cool and wet weather, and even the pea vines that I'd planted months ago crept along slowly. A lot of gardening is knowing when to compromise one's ideals -- you can negotiate with the weather somewhat, but you can't ignore it.
Moving out to the wilds of Woodinville made a gardener out of me. I was born and raised a Capitol Hill girl, and grew herbs on and off for most of my life, but it wasn't until we crossed the lake and settled on the Eastside that I found myself with both space and time to start to garden in earnest. In the face of what seemed at first a social wasteland, tending our own acre and building a garden around ourselves was a comfort.
We moved out here in the fall of 1996, our offer having been accepted just in time for the streets surrounding our new home to blossom with a great profusion of Ellen Craswell signs the size of VW beetles, for the falling leaves to reveal church signboards promoting Christian alternatives to Halloween and for us to find ourselves wondering exactly what we'd done.
It was one of those moments when our politics were sorely divided. Culturally, we were Westsiders, happily looking forward to buying a craftsman bungalow in Wallingford and settling down to growing corn on our parking strip and raising children to light candles on the Fremont Troll and watch the Morris dancers at Beltaine in gasworks park. Professionally, however, we were more and more tied to the software industry and the Eastside, and as much as we loved the liberal culture of our neighborhood, we could not justify the many miles we drove each day to haul our sorry butts to work. Bad enough to own a car, but putting it to such use seemed a terrible shame. Still, we might have compromised our environmental ideals had it not been increasingly clear that the choice was not between living on the Eastside or in Seattle, but between living on the Eastside or on the 520 bridge.
On the Eastside we could have a garden, and an orchard, and bicycle to work. No more evenings of buying bland overpriced food in Bellevue because we were hungry and exhausted and the bridge was uncrossable. We found a house a couple of blocks from a grocery store and a library, and located a co-op. We read up on septic systems. I contemplated the ways in which heavy involvement in the public pagan community had taken time away from my personal practice. We were told comforting lies about broadband availability. We closed our eyes and took the plunge.
When I'm talking neighborhood and culture, I'm also talking politics at it's simplest level. Growing up on Capitol Hill in the seventies, perhaps this has been especially clear to me. My mother bemoans to this day the pair of clogs she lost when she and my father were among the many people tear gassed while taking over I-5 during Vietnam protest marches. I grew up with hand-me-down clothes and playing with the toys in the children's corner in the co-op. The neighborhood changed, but still I was into my teens before I really ran into gender discrimination, or met anyone who opposed sex education in schools. (Racism was rather another story, though in an odd, guilty, liberal apologist sort of way.) Religious harmony, at least among relatively mainstream religons, was something I took for granted. And long -haired pagans were, certainly by my early twenties, a recognizable and accepted type.
I both am and am not an activist. I vote. (Don't get me started. But please, vote.) I write letters. I sign petitions, and have occasionally staffed booths. I'm an avid recycler and conscious consumer. I don't like participating in protest marches (while I agree that they are often magical workings, the mob mentality at many protest marches gives me the willies), but I will occasionally do so. Mostly, though, I'm a working-through-the-system type. It's even not entirely out of the realm of possibility that I might run for office some day, though it seems rather unlikely at the moment.
While I am generally fascinated by politics, the part closest to my heart is pretty small scale. It's the part where you're talking about the world with your neighbor, or officemate, your grandmother, the guy you ride the bus with or the kid who knocks on your door trying to sell you calendars. I like debate, debate is fun, but I'm finding myself more and more interested in the work of broadening and building more room in the middle. Of building consensus, or at least awareness and tolerance.
But let me get back to the long-haired pagans in their twenties that we once were, suddenly in the wilds of conservative Northeast King County. One of the problems with living in a liberal enclave, and especially growing up in one, is that it is a very sheltered environment. Spend too much time there, and it's easy to forget that your neighborhood isn't really representative of the rest of the world, and that not only are there people whose views differ greatly from yours, but they have lives and circumstances that have both created and reflect their views. And more often than not, if you can understand their premises, they are fairly logical and internally consistent.
Maybe in some ways it was a good thing that we were reminded so forcefully as we moved in that we were a lot farther than we were used to be from the People's Republic of Fremont. We did not, as far as I know, step on toes terribly hard starting off. (Though there was that incident where the neighbors were under the impression that a lesbian couple was moving in next door, and I must say I have never before been possessed by such mixed feelings when introducing my husband. "No," I wanted to say, "He's not my girlfriend, but if you'd like to meet her she'll be stopping by for Full Moon tomorrow.") Instead, we tried to be pleasant, polite, long-haired hippie geeks, and take some time to get to know the lay of the land. And in my case, I became a gardener.
It didn't happen overnight. That first year I started working on laying out the herb garden, but my forays into growing vegetables involved planting a purchased tomato plant or two in the vegetable plot next to the old orchard. Without fertilizer, or supplementary water, they survived, but did not, shall we say, thrive. But gardening is a cyclical endeavor. Having learned a bit about what I didn't know, I did some research over the next year, and started planning out the next year's campaign. We built the first raised beds. I put in my first seed orders, grew my first tomatoes from seed and joined Tilth.
Our first few attempts to get to know our neighbors were similarly unfruitful. Was it our clothes? Did we mention recycling with an untoward fervor? I really can't remember. Nothing much came of it. Occasionally we'd waved to each other on the road. Their teenage son and his friends once snuck into our yard late at night. (For what purposes I can only imagine -- did they guess that our circle met that evening?)
The gardening itself became a bridge. Having started those tomatoes from seed, I then of course had too many starts, which is a fine time to remember that one has neighbors. Gardening, it turns out, is one of the great near universal subjects of conversation, far more engrossing than (though certainly not exclusive of) the weather. And between fruit trees and tomatoes, and slugs and deer, it turned out we had something in common after all. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be possible to get by in almost any small town in this country if one gardened, knew how to bake bread and could discuss these topics in an inoffensive and reasonably wholesome manner. Who can believe ill of such a person?
We put in the second two raised beds and grew tomatoes on trellises five feet tall. And then lost most of the crop to late blight. We met the people across the way, another couple of younger techies, and pawned off two or three tomato plants on them, too. The boy around the corner came up to see what I was doing while I set up the luminaria on Samhain, and then stayed to see the kittens and help light the candles. He would later stop by to show off his A+ math and spelling tests. (It wasn't until the next year that he learned I wasn't Christian, mentioned this to his mother and was promptly forbidden to speak to me. Soon after that the family moved, apparently not liking the direction the neighborhood was heading. I'm sure it wasn't just us.)
Now I discuss lettuce and zucchini with the woman doing check-out in the grocery, and keep an eye on which of the courtesy clerks is wearing a pentacle (witchcraft being, as it is, so trendy -- I feel a somewhat proprietary fondness for them, but have never volunteered more than a "Happy Solstice"). We're no longer the newest family on the street, and as the years have passed we've learned that a household of witches lives around the corner from us, and a Druid couple have moved up on the hill. A street or two over are friends who are working on building intentional community, and a bit down the road is another friend who studies the same martial arts we do. On Beltane, a May basket was left hanging from our door.
It's not that the neighborhood has changed so drastically. Much of the change has been that we've gotten to know it better, and have through time uncovered our kindred.
But change does occur, slowly, the way soil you've tended for years becomes darker, soft and crumbly, little by little. A woman I was talking with in the park confides that her son is studying tarot. Should she worry? she asks. My friend, speaking of me, tells her father "You do realize that she's a witch, don't you?" And he responds, "She's a good girl." My doctor wishes me a happy Halloween -- "Now this is a big time for you, isn't it?" he asks with a smile.
It seems, more and more, like we're just a couple more threads, maybe of unusual color, woven into the community, picking out another pattern. Over time, and with care, the strange becomes normal, part of a shifting and growing idea of what normal, or normal enough, can mean.
And every year, not once, but several times as the seasons turn, I plant my garden. The tomatoes went out late this year, but the weather warmed up and they are making up for lost time. I'm hoping the squash, peppers and eggplant will do as well. As I write this I have chard as tall as my knees in yellow, burgundy and peppermint-striped pink, and the pea vines, having come into their own, are covered with flowers and young pods. The spinach never found its feet, bolting and trying to flower without really leafing out, but there's always next year. Maybe this year will be a stellar year for sun-loving nightshades. Maybe it will be cool and rainy and we'll be eating peas and radishes in August. No year has been entirely bad or entirely good, but some are better than others. But each year I learn a few more ways of doing things and learn the land a little better, and it learns me.