choosing life

I'll never forget the first cabbage I grew.

Jeremy and I were living in an ugly purple house in Provo, Utah, the first house we rented after getting married. The kitchen was a cramped whitewashed cubbyhole and I never once used the oven. We were too poor to fill the compartmentalized living room with more than a single couch. The backyard housed several apricot trees and untended grapevines. I spent several days ripping old vines out of the fence to restore the grapes, and we pruned the apricots, knowing nothing of what we were doing but still allowing new growth for the first time in years.

(Several months later our landlady stopped by and stripped every last apricot from those trees. I've never quite forgiven her for it.)

The backyard also contained three raised beds that were filled with that infamously rocky Utah soil. If you ever find yourself pulling rocks out of a garden bed in Utah your neighbors will probably ask you to let them know when you reach China. It's considered a great joke. If the rocks are not enough to make you scream, there's always the scourge of morning glory. I spent most of my time in the garden pulling out those vines. I envisioned a hulking alien knot of bindweed lurking in the city's sewage pipes, dispensing its daughter vines into the soil above, malevolently intent upon consuming the city.

In that knotted salty soil I sunk my first roots – carrots and potatoes, squash and cucumbers, cherry tomatoes and strawberries. Then I got pregnant and spent most of my time sleeping in the impossibly hot, impossibly white bedroom upstairs. Some of the plants thrived despite my lack of attention. The strawberries died, the carrot seeds blew away, but we were overwhelmed by baby potatoes and the tomatoes bore more fruit than I could ever possibly use. A month before our landlady broke our lease so her son could have the house, the cabbages looked well enough to eat.

I don't think I'd ever eaten cabbage before. I wasn't sure what to do with it. Buying those starts was a case of my eyes being bigger than my stomach, because I didn't know anything about gardening. My only experience with plants was that bean-sprout-in-a-paper-cup experiment in second grade. I just wanted to grow something, make a new life out of anything. The garden and my pregnancy sprouted from the same soil – a tentative, immature, but hopeful love of life, the first and most honest love I ever knew. Pulling that cabbage out of the ground – which required quite a bit of muscle – felt like the fruition of something greater than a seed.

I can close my eyes and be taken back to that moment in an instant. It was evening, the bugs were in full force, and when the plant came out of the ground its green scent filled the air. I was absurdly proud of myself, but I must have looked bizarre, with my small baby bump and this huge plant with its huge roots hanging down and my hands covered in dirt and a big sloppy grin on my face. I carried the cabbage over to the picnic table and Jeremy began navigating the soil and leaves the size of plates with a big knife, trying to cut away the head of cabbage so we could do something with it. Eat it, I guess.

Finally he released the cabbage head and then he sliced it in half and how can I describe the awe I felt in that moment? I had very little to do with that cabbage's existence – someone else planted and fed the seed, I just stuck it in the ground and watered it when I remembered, which wasn't that often. It probably wasn't the finest specimen of cabbage, but it seemed that way to me.

I don't remember exactly how we ate that cabbage. It's possible that we didn't even finish it. But I do remember the flavor, and the feeling that a heart of significance was being revealed to me.

As a child I kept common garden snails as pets, housing them in 2-liter Coke bottles with the labels peeled off, feeding them lovingly with greens and soil and wiping away the condensation so I could watch their strange, laborious movements. On the flipside, I stored dead birds in an empty shoebox. Okay, so maybe I was a weird kid. I can't imagine what my parents thought when they found them. I used to gently cradle their frail, weightless bodies, poring over the hollow wing bones, peering inside the skull. I think that on some subconscious level I was trying to understand the line between the living and the dead.

In the trajectory of my life I've often been confused by that line, and uncertain of which side I wanted to be on. I grew up in a lifeless place, surrounded by the blasted, burned-out, paved-over remains of living systems and people who struggled to survive without a thought for where they resided in relation to that line. My childhood was characterized by violence, boredom, and helplessness, and the few positive memories I have always include some green living thing, or green living space, or the rare green living person who showed me there was another way to be in the world.

I want to be that person, living in that place, growing those things. Every time I plant a seed I am reaffirming that hope... and that choice. Life.