Go Plant Some Turnips … or Something
Published in Marietta Daily Journal (GA) July 2/3, 2022
It’s
a bit late to plant turnips, but late summer or early fall will afford
gardeners another opportunity. Turnips,
like their cousins the collards, prefer cool weather, so early spring or early
fall planting can produce the best results. Full disclosure: I’ve defied the
experts and the Master Gardeners several times regarding tomatoes and flowers
and have achieved what I sought, but I don’t recommend that. Those Master Gardeners
know what they’re talking about. They can make anything look beautiful or
tasteful.
It’s
not really turnips or tomatoes or tulips that are on my mind. It’s the fact that Americans have become so
far removed from the good earth that our minds and attitudes are getting messed
up. We are so urbanized and so immersed in politics that we need release. And it’s not just children and teens who need
to get outdoors. Adults do as well.
Vitamin D is one good reason for the outdoors, but mental health is as
important as physical health. I’ve no doubt that good doses of outside air,
more views of the trees around us, and more chats with our next-door neighbors
would affect even our politics for the better. Dirty hands can help too. And
sweating never hurt anybody.
It’s
also not just our kids and grandkids who think that groceries come from grocery
stores. I’ve no doubt that adults as well
saunter through the grocery store aisles giving no thought at all to the
origins of all the wondrous things they are beholding. I wonder if they consider what they’re
beholding as wondrous.
How wrong President John Adams was: “Our
boundary will reach the Pacific in no more than 300 years and we will build a
great democracy every step of the way.” Talk about British understatement.
Adams was truly an American politically, but like so many others he was still
drying off from British English. The early Americans were firmly established in
California by 1846. The happy urge to get outside, explore, and build or plant
something, just would not allow early Americans to stay inside.
Most people reading this may as well
forget about raising a hog, keeping a calf that you must vaccinate or neuter,
gathering corn, or pulling up peanuts.
We live too close together for all of that. But somehow we’ve all got to do something that reminds us
of who and what we are and were, where and what we came from, what the earth we
live on is like, and what its many benefits are. After all what we eat still comes from the
earth. That means dirt.
Yet dirt is not respected. There’s no money in dirt or manual labor any
more, we’re told. Besides, dirt is
dirty. So get thee to a college and get
a degree. Think corporate world. Major in feminine studies, international law,
or something else eclectic, whatever that means. Your future lies not in your
functioning hands but in your functioning brain. Nope, wrong again. The average
age of plumbers in America is 60. That means we better stop steering so many
youths away from a future of physical labor. Besides, plumbers, cattlemen,
electricians, farmers, mechanics and such have to have good minds to do their
essential kinds of work and their rewards or pay are far more than a pittance.
My family was cotton and corn. My
wife’s was cotton and dairy cows. We shucked corn. My wife’s mother stepped
carefully down into a well hidden, rocky-clad spring to place butter in a
naturally refrigerated little cave. How did two country kids become teachers of
poetry? I suspect it was because we had experienced the poetry – the rhythms
and beauty – of the seasons and of the agrarian, rural life. Cows move slowly.
Corn grows fast. Everything about cotton is wretched. A nearby garden of
colorful vegetables can take the edge off of the cotton field.
Americans
are one nation under therapy and one reason is that a few decades back, we
began to ignore and eventually ceased taking advantage of the healing,
therapeutic qualities of the outdoors.
But let me back away a bit from the above claim that we live too close
together to do certain outdoor things. Most
houses and apartment back yards have enough space for four or five tomato
plants. For the sake of our individual and collective sanity as well as for the
sake of the American spirit, please go plant something. Then care for it, watch it grow, and see what
it does to you long before you harvest and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
Roger
Hines
6/29/22
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