American Grown

Summer is here. 

Again, I marvel at how impossibly busy our small family can be. We raced through May and June like amusement park revelers, testing the boundaries of sanity and speed, trusting the onset of summer to mark the finish line. I’ve been telling myself I’m too busy to write well right now. So I get my word fix at our neighborhood bookstore, hungrily browsing, imagining that some day a jacket with my very own title will grace the front window display. On a recent dash past said window a strange image caught my eye. Who is that glamorous black woman, laden with her garden’s harvest, smiling out at me? It seems Michelle Obama – busy mother of two! – has published her first book: American Grown. It’s all about the White House kitchen garden. So. Cool. I jumped inside, to make it my own.

The book is full of photographs of Michelle Obama’s journey into gardening. 

It connects the work she's been doing to combat childhood obesity and the symbolic power of home-grown food. She includes a piece about famed urban farmer Will Allen, and the phenomenal influence he's had in cities around the country, and in the local food movement. But the main topic is the White House garden, and the lessons learned while building it.

Back to the front cover. 

The image is slightly startling, rich with saturated colors. Our First Lady looks gorgeous as usual, with her hair in a loose up-do, diamond stud earrings, and a crisp navy blue oxford shirt. She's holding a large, weathered basket at pelvis height, stuffed with eggplants, chard, corn, zucchini and tomatoes of various types. Gorgeous again. But Mrs. Obama is too coiffed and too clean to have been working in the garden. She looks more like she's headed to the yacht club. Throughout the book, even when pictured on her knees in the dirt, her clothes – down to her choice of gloves - are not those of a real laborer. The book reveals her reality: a staff of gardeners and chefs maintains the White House kitchen garden. But our First Lady is garden proud, spreading the kitchen garden gospel to the uninformed masses. And her focus is the children of this country, who desperately need to hear what she's preaching. Praise be.

Maybe the First Lady of the United States of America doesn't want to appear on the cover of a thirty-dollar hardcover book in dirt-smudged overalls. Maybe the Obamas’ publicity machine can’t allow it.  For fear that such an image might reflexively remind us of the countless black women in the fields who, in their time, symbolized poverty, malnutrition and inescapable oppression. Without access to diamond earrings and the yacht club.

Ladybird Johnson, another great White House gardening enthusiast, had far less complicated image issues.

As for me, I’m in a semi-permanent state of dirt-smudged-ness. 

Lately, I've been gardening as much as my lower back can handle. Our new-old house came with a big, blank yard. And this weird, warm Spring has pushed the growing season here in the Northeast about a month ahead of normal schedule. So I’m out back as much as time and strength will allow.

I dig and I weed, and I plant, because it feels so good to put energy into the earth. 

The earth doesn't whine or complain, or refuse to eat the meals I prepare. It doesn't need me to teach it, or scold it. The earth quietly accepts my efforts, offering up magical returns. The dark soil under my fingernails reminds me of my mother's weathered  hands, and the botanist's flare she inherited from her father. I remember my father raking endless leaves, admiring the landscape of his own proud acre,  just like his Massachusetts grandmother did. And the distant history of Lenape Indian earth-worship embedded in my veins. 

We've given our children a large garden in which to learn and play. 

They’re lucky and they know it. A huge THANKS is due to Michelle Obama, and the current wave of earth crusaders, on behalf of all the kids who aren't so fortunate.