[Garden Memories: XXXIII]
Everywhere I walk on my farm, I think of landscapes from my childhood. The grass field reminds me of the lawn we played so many hours of volleyball on; the small forest on the east side of my property conjures of memories of the the “Black Forest” I used to play in on the back hill; the chicken coop invokes images of Nonno harvesting a rooster and Mom’s chicken houses; the herb beds remind me of our manicured flower beds that bordered the front and back of the house.
So much of my gardening is a return to my childhood; it’s an effort, in a way, to recover something lost that only lives in my memory.
I’ll never recover my childhood taste of persimmons. Not in a literal way. (And I can’t bring myself to buy them from Whole Foods, so I’ll likely never taste them again.) But the 48 fruit trees that I’ve planted are undeniably an effort to recover lost landscapes, lost sensuous encounters with nature, lost tastes and smells.
We long for a connection with nature again. It’s hardwired in us. For many of us, it’s been since childhood that we were embedded in the wild. For some, we’ve been outside, but it’s for exercise or fresh air or for the view.
But in us all there’s a need for unrestrained, unprogrammed, undocumented encounters with nature. Our hearts would sing with just one messy spoonful of a ripe persimmon.
