Sarah and I talked about planting an imaginary garden when i saw her last week in a dreamed up place..I have the vegetables and she grows the flowers.

So, I begin with Milpa,the Three Sisters…In this garden,the soil is deep and rich and brown and loamy from years of attentive gardeners who have enriched it adding layers of nutrients…I sit and dig my hands in it, its warmth, its life, its smell. it’s good enough to eat. It’s like holding life in your hands. It’s what we all become. I think about Sarah years ago at an ecology camp in the southern California desert singing a song about about how dirt made her lunch, her dinner and her brunch. I think about her planting a garden in the front yard of her West Oakland apt with friends helping doing the double digging method.

So, we begin. I want the corn to grow in a half moon shape, pointing down, no straight rows, with 12 stalks in the back arc, then 10, then 8. It will be Zapatista corn from Chiapas. I will build up mounds and flatten the tops like mesas with a kind of scooped up place on the top. Then 2 or 3 corn kernels go there pushed in with a finger. I use my hands so i can feel the dirt and see the seeds disappear into the earth. On the sides of the mounds, I plant beans, some scarlett runners for their beauty and some snappy greens and french greens, 4 seed around each corn and these will grow and twirl around the stalks and the stalks will hold them up perfectly. On the ground around the stalks I plant squash, different kinds; zucchini, summer, blossom to cover the ground around the corn and beans, keep in the moisture and keep out the weeds. In a matter of weeks, the Three Sisters grow together, all caretaking one another, like Sarah, Shane and Josh are, a food jungle yielding and yielding. And we will look forward to zucchini bread and fritters and bean salad and corn, corn, corn. The sun warms my back and I scoop water from a barrel of rainwater and give each seed its first drink. They start to grow—free.

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