Garden Elves

The clouds are clotting around the tops of the bluffs just above The Grauer School, like they do this time of year. They make it look like a mountain ridge with jagged minarets. Below, the school is just a bowl filled in with cottony mist you could almost eat. It is the winter solstice in Encinitas.

I was still groggy and I threw on thick clothes and was pulling out my van from the driveway. Joe was already out walking his two dogs, and I said “Morning, Joe,” which sounded like a proverb. He waved. I headed down to the school. I knew Stephanie Murphy, our Grauer Garden Coordinator, would be at school early today. 

Christmas was near and making things busy, and there she was, hands moving with assembly-line precision, laser-focused on one plant bed, then the next. She held up a bunch of something high with both hands, like a newborn. A small cloud of mist rose from it in the early white light that turned her into a silhouette. It was the only time all morning I saw her pause, and she looked cheerful and diminutive like an elf in blue jeans, wiry with serious, knowing eyes. Then back to it.

I approached the garden and a 3-foot zucchini was already resting in the blue wagon with a bunch of prehistoric-size kale leaves. All around the picket fence, the grape leaves were starting to turn a mulberry purple. 

Stephanie darted back and forth in her hiking boots and army green jacket, white braided pigtail hanging out the back of her ball cap, now labelling brown paper bags “new potatoes.” They had thin yellow and wine-color skin, and they were wet, with sun gleaming off of them. These potatoes and lettuces were all colors of byzantine and jam and raisin and plum and eggplant and mauve. For the first time ever, I got what the title of that movie, “The Color Purple” meant. The enlightenment and stimulation of red and the calm and benevolence of blue mean winter vegetables. Stephanie went to her clipboard list and crossed off “new potatoes.”

Inside the fence, all the beds were overflowing. In the first bed, little greens, miniature romaine, were soft and buttery looking. Stephanie pulled one up for me, but my dog Paco was having none of it and needed the ball thrown. This was the last day before the winter holiday break, the last day of final exam week, the last day of this semester of recovery from last year’s exhaustion. Harvesting feels like the stability we need at this time: all the leafy greens plus parsnips, turnips, potatoes, chives, dill, all the winter stuff you get in Encinitas, home of the poinsettia. 

The light was slanted and the atmosphere was dewy and thick, so I was photographing. There had been rain last night, the sun was coming up fast, things were dripping with morning dew everywhere. The pond was overgrown but we did not want an algae bloom over the holiday break, so Stephanie was leaving it that way.

The goal today is a winter harvest so we can all have produce over the holidays, and so it won’t all be overgrown when we come back.  (When we get back, we’re going to replant more winter vegetables, like bok choi, a Chinese native, Stephanie says.) “Push down a bit, and twist a little to break up all those feeder roots,” she instructed me. I could feel the roots breaking off and I was not sure if I was hearing that, too. And I pulled up a white turnip with 2 feet of leaves. 

I had missed breakfast, so I started gnawing on a romaine head I’d pulled out. I thought: not bad. The sun was getting higher now and you could feel the lovely warmth filling in the hilly bowl where the school sits nestled. There was a little wet black dirt on the leaf I was eating, but I didn’t mind. “So gorgeous,” Stephanie said, as she moved scientifically and quickly, filling in the wagon with wet leafies that were condensing in the sun. 

“Why so early today?” I asked even though I knew. 

“We can’t leave anything, everything must be harvested, and we’ll give it away at drop off to all the parents out on a table out front. And to the teachers, whoever wants it. I put a little blip in the school newsletter Tuesday.” Not a movement was inefficient, every walking line straight. Paco was nonsensically wandering around all over the garden sniffing everything.

My mind went off for a minute. When I was a new teacher in New York City, I discovered a very new movement called global perspectives in education where we focused on global issues like hunger. Andrew Smith was publishing a newsletter with that name right in Manhattan near my school, filled with cool lessons. Hal Kuebler was doing the world food program just a few blocks over at the UN, and he told me and my students how most of the people in the world eat rice most of the time. Global was local, we imagined it as a village, and I eventually I wrote my whole doctoral thesis on that, about people like that, but by then the movement was becoming something intellectual and theorized and political, and not having much to do with real people and how they really connect with each other in real communities. The global perspectives movement was becoming about money being thrown around, and power. It was a cause with slogans, and it was airlifted, not a thing you do in your own village. And it was supermarkets for Americans, and now of course it is COVID-19. It is amazing what happens in the human mind, how it makes these crazy associations that start out real and personal and warm and eventually drift into the abstract and impersonal and statistical. I dropped out of that movement and now, this morning, pulling out Chinese broccoli and bunching it up it feels a little like being in a movement again. It feels like a cure.

I stuffed too much of a peppery bunch of mixed lettuce into my mouth and the leaves were sticking to my palette. I crushed and chewed and shifted my jaw around. 

Last summer, the Yale climate blog posted, “Never in the century-plus history of world weather observation have so many all-time heat records fallen by such a large margin.” What do we do with this fragile world?

All over the campus, the trees, flowers and vegetables have been overflowing all season, and now we are preparing to rest, though I can hardly picture Stephanie, who made all this happen, at rest. “Harvest as abundantly as you can, because you can freeze it or can it for later,” she says, as we pulled out more butter crunch. “That’s going to go into the mixed lettuce,” and she brings out a giant roll of baggies and hands it over to me. 
 
“When we get back, we’ll be pruning the fruit trees, I have a seed order for flowers and edibles, the butterfly garden needs a lot of help, I’ve got some stuff to plant there.” We talked about our families and neighbors, and the holidays. A honeybee clung to the Chinese celery—I’ve been seeing bumble bees and regular bees around the campus lately and, just yesterday Evren (grade 7) had been explaining several of the species of them to me. And just then, Evren shows up, right here at the garden!

We all move over to the Ethiopian kale, which Stephanie says is for sautés or soups. Now we need to get all this out to the drop off pretty quick, so I stop taking notes. I stuff baggies to give to our school's parents at drop off. I load them up in the wagon, which Stephanie had a hand towel draped on, a detail I found amazing, because we would need to wipe the wetness off the table she had moved to the student drop off area. She thought of that detail. A hand towel.

Finals were ending and people were ready to take off for the holidays. The last thing in the whole world I thought of telling them was what every other school head in the county was telling everyone: Follow all our THREE-PART SAFETY PLAN:  Get VACCINATED, and if eligible, get your booster. TEST FREQUENTLY, and ask friends and family to do so before you gather this season. If your child or a member of your family tests positive, contact the school. Follow the protocols we have been using for almost two years: MASK, PHYSICAL DISTANCE, and AVOID HIGH-RISK SITUATIONS. 

The ubiquitous health and safety warnings do not occur to me this morning.

It seems like we are in a completely different zone, maybe a purple zone, like in Alice Walker’s epistolary. I love our community and know the answers are right here in it. We are the real public health, the global health squadron. Maybe that is a foolish thing to think. Maybe I should be giving County health memos like all the other school heads, instead of lettuce. I thought of the parents who no longer come on campuses, and just do their own gardening or connecting, and I wished this would all end and that they would come back and work with Stephanie who runs the garden club, almost alone half the time, irrepressible. 

I ran a few wagon loads over to the table, arranged it all and ran back and forth to the garden twice to check in quickly with Stephanie. I want to make sure I know the names of everything I was supposed to be handing out. Now cars are just starting to arrive. 

Now a student is approaching the gateway, the first of the day. I pull a leaf of light green soft-looking lettuce out of one of the baggies and handed it to him, and he sleepily receives it. He is pretty reluctant, so I sort of make him eat it. Now Evren is with me at the table bargaining for the giant zucchini that says he is going to sauté, and we are each running out to cars with handfuls of leafies. I’m sure parents do not even know Stephanie was back there moving like an elf in the garden, and almost everyone grinned at farmers Evren and Stuart as we darted back and forth, reached right into their cars, and laid herbs and greens and tubers onto their passenger seats.

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