Last, but not least, there is a need for audacious hope. And it's not optimism. I'm in no way an optimist. I've been black in America for 39 years. No ground for optimism here, given the progress and regress and three steps forward and four steps backward. Optimism is a notion that there's sufficient evidence that would allow us to infer that if we keep doing what we're doing, things will get better. I don't believe that. I'm a prisoner of hope, that's something else. Cutting against the grain, against the evidence. William James said it so well in that grand and masterful essay of his of 1879 called "The Sentiment of Rationality," where he talked about faith being the courage to act when doubt is warranted. And that's what I'm talking about.
- Cornel West, from the 1993 commencement speech at Wesleyan University
Virginia to Wisconsin to California to Colorado to New York back to Virginia. Each place we lived, I hoped and half-believed it would be our home. In each place, we cultivated a circle of friends. Bug had his little buddies, I sought my dance and poetry.
In each place we lived, I planted a garden.
Gardening is audacity. Learning the fickle moods of the soil can take seasons. Years. The climate, the bend of the shade, the ants and voles, the clays and acids, and even just the way the rain pools all work together to create the unique temperament of the land. Tending a garden is not so different from tending a relationship. Over time, gardener and land grow to anticipate one another. The soil, in its way, awaits the tilling, the seeding, the gentle tending and the rough nip of pruners. The gardener comes to love the garden with that tricky combination of pleasure and irritation reserved for the most intimate companions.
Every time our family landed in a new place during the past six or seven years, I began at the beginning. No previous tenant left me an overgrown patch to weed, no departed lover left a guidebook. I started with nothing but a shrug and a shovel. Let the seeds fall where they may.
The amount of money I spent on of fresh dirt and manure and plants makes me cringe now, seeing the creep of red in my bank book. The number of miles I traveled to local land preservation offices to gather information and precious packets of native seeds has me shaking my head in awe. These days, I can barely squeeze in a trip to the supermarket.
In each place, friends and neighbors reluctantly allowed me to drag them into my sweat-drenched folly. Bug and Tee had no choice in the matter. Both donned work gloves and picked up shovels to help prepare the earth and sow the seeds.
I figured the first season would be the learning season. Little did I know each first was also my last. But this is the way of faith, isn't it? Cornel West differentiates between optimism and hope. Optimism ignores the evidence, believing in a happy outcome despite all the challenges in the way. Hope, however, is welll acquainted with the obstacles. Hope plots a path through them.
Over the years of uprooting, my desire for a home for our family grew to an aching, chronic hunger. With every move, I walked the tightrope between hope and defeat. Perhaps ironically, perhaps in the fierce determination to make it so, I invested far more cash and sweat in the garden of the last place we inhabited as a family. In New York, I ringed the perimeter fence with narcissus bulbs and native plants. Bug and I grew peas in the one patch of sun in the yard, and surrounded this with a mix of flowers whose names now swept from my memory. We edged the house in pansies, planted carrots on a support wall, and turned the dreary front yard into a splash of color. All of this we labored to create as our known life was fragmenting under our feet.
Sure, the effort was desperate. But desperation can lead to far worse than tulips and snow peas. I like to hope that the lilies I dredged up by hand from the creek bottom and hauled to our cabin will multiply for the people who live there long after our names are forgotten. Those two small spruce trees we planted in the burnt soil of our Colorado home might grow to house songbirds returning after the ravages of the Hayman Fire. Maybe the effort was not all in vain.
I learned a hard lesson with these futile attempts at marking a place. One cannot force roots into soil not ready to make way. The earth has to get to know its inhabitants. I have left every home far too quickly to have anything but the most fleeting knowledge of place.
Here we are in yet another temporary home. Here, Bug and I are guests in my parents' house. Their back yard is filled almost to the edges with a swimming pool. The rest, my mother tends. She buys her flowers and trims her hedges. Her aesthetic is unique to her, and she has lived in this place 15 years. She has had ample time to learn where the sun will fall and whether the snapdragons will make it through until summer.
But this is our home, too. Even if it is another way station for Bug and me, it is still the only home we have. For Bug, whose life has been punctuated by a move every 18 months, a home of his own is important in a way most of us cannot fathom.
My son began talking a few weeks ago about moving into our new house. I let the comments slip on past until a recent dinnertime conversation. Out of the blue: "What will our next house be like, Mommy?" I asked him what he meant. He explained, "We have to move to our next house soon."
Right there at the dinner table, I leaned in and looked him square in the eye. "This is our home. This, right here, is your house." I put my hand down on the table. "We are not moving anywhere. We are going to live here for a long, long time."
"How long?"
"Until you are big. Much bigger. Maybe first or second grade. Big like your cousin."
He considered this quietly. So did his grandparents, who were understandably surprised by this declaration.
Truth is, a place of our own is far beyond reach at the moment. Necessity dictates we stick around. Staying, however, is more than the natural outcome of financial constraint and proximity to Tee. Bug has never experienced continuity. Even now, the kid doesn't know where he is sleeping from one night to the next. The least I can do is give him one fixed variable on my side of the equation. When he needs to have a sense that he belongs somewhere, he can come to this sloppy, old place and find his mom, his grandparents, his dog, his bed, and a little corner of familiarity to which he can return no matter how much confusion the world throws at him.
High time, I would say, to plant a garden. Our garden, Bug's and mine.
We asked Grandma for a plot of our own in the midst of her ornamentals. She found one for us, and even handed over a few slivers of her precious sunlight. We turned the soil, righted bricks for a raised bed, and gathered sticks from a giant pine tree blown down in last month's storm. Together, my boy and I fashioned a bean-pole tent. Bug helped me dig, rake, relocate worms (a key task, I have learned) and trim the hemp line. Once everything was ready, we squatted together. Bug lifted each pea from my palm and placed it in its new nest of earth.
This is our first season growing in this soil. I aim to stick around long enough for my boy to reap the harvest. Change is, of course, inevitable. Fate could laugh at my folly. She might decide to make short work of my big plans. But we have to live with audacity. We have to plant ourselves where we are. Faith, the man says, is the courage to act when doubt is warranted. Perhaps this small corner of the land will share a secret or two, and we will be here next spring to feel the deepening of our roots.
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