It was sunny today and above freezing. This combination of weather events was pure joy to my gray winter bones. After months of hunkering down it was as if June suddenly descended upon me. I wasn’t the only one. There were more families walking to school today, more runners on the roads, dog walkers looked a bit more giddy than usual. Literally, a spring in our steps and the air.

I kid you not, I actually thought of running in shorts today. The predicted high was only 38. But there is some form of insanity that engulfs a midwesterner after a long winter. I darted in and out of places today without a jacket. 38 degrees is just 6 whopping digits above freezing. There is still snow on my driveway. But I was going to skip out on my jacket if it killed me today.

When it hits 40 middle school kids will start wearing shorts. When it hits 50 the high school students will don them. And by 60 degrees we will all be wearing flip flops. Pasty white toes sticking out of rubber sandals. A sign that we just cannot wait another minute to douse ourselves in the sunshine.

I told my husband to pull the big wheels out and I thought of looking for my son’s bicycle. I am insane. It will snow next week.

But the reminder that spring is coming and my yearning to hurry it up is a great moment to pause and notice the sheer joy we experience in the changing of the seasons. To emerge from winter is to embrace all that is budding and waiting patiently in the earth. Of bulbs waiting to push through the frozen soil, of the magnolia buds already heavy on the tree outside our window. Of the fact that God is bringing new life from the frozen tundra of both the land and our very souls.

If I think on it for too long I get all sappy. And I get stressed. There are seeds to buy and debris to clear from the yard. A squirrel has taken up residence in the basketball hoop and keeps throwing sticks down onto my car. Thunderstorms will come soon, scared children will jump up with a bolt of lightening and drag me from my sleep.

But I am excited for all of these marvels. And for my flip flops. To put my winter feet, complete with lint traces from my wool socks, into a pair of sandals is to declare myself the winner. To trump winter and dance into spring is to overcome both my vitamin D deficiency and some of the darker recesses of my soul. Of course they will still linger on, they always do. Winter always returns. But for a day doused in sunshine I felt for a moment like I could actually handle life. An elusive and always fleeting moment, but one to embrace nonetheless.

May your days bring warmth, budding life, and the joy of God’s spring to your soul!

I think my garden is officially closed. We plucked the last green bean today and pulled a few cracked tomatoes off their stems. The kale is still hanging on for the ride, but I sort of over-dosed on that earlier this year so just looking at it pretty much makes me shiver.

My daughter toddled out to the garden to help me yank the last bits of summer. She’d just had a bath and then I decided to haul her outside to the garden. The day after it rained. I am brilliant like this.

We plucked green beans. She yanked leaves and such. Squatting like a pioneer woman making corn meal or something, she hovered over the bowl and threw in whatever looked good. A few beans, a slug looking sort of thing (I kid you not) and even an old carrot that managed to hide out and escape a pluck earlier in the summer.

Then of course she started to throw the plum tomatoes. They look like balls so I cannot fault her. “Ball” she says as she chucks it across the garden. “More balls” she says as she grabs for another. The kicker this time was that these little tomatoes are like gold. There is nothing on this planet that tastes quite like a home grown tomato and I know that I will not taste one again for a good 9-10 months.

So I shrieked and grabbed her grubby little hands. “Here, pull weeds honey” (or at least throw the beans) I said as I confiscated the tomatoes.

We managed to go almost the entire summer without purchasing any vegetables from the store. Sure, we grabbed lettuce and the bell peppers that I had decided not to grow. But for the past 5 months we have managed to eat most of our veggies from the garden. I underestimated what a phenomenal sense of accomplishment this would bring me.

Like the time I was preparing lunch for the kids and realized we were out of carrots, so I stepped outside and yanked a handful out of the ground. And all the fresh basil I’ve tossed into pasta, the cucumbers and tomatoes with every meal. Mint for my Mojito fetish. Sugar snap peas and green beans galore.

Accomplishment means everything to a mom who cannot finish a thought. So finishing a garden, I may as well have won an Oscar.

And of course, there are people who garden way better than I do. People who are still pulling fall crops out of their gardens, people who have planted to eat squash and such for several weeks to come. I was not one of them. But all comparisons aside, I sort of feel like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I really do. Like I am in Kansas with Ma and Pa, Mary and baby Carrie.

Either that or I am on the Banks of Plum Creek waiting for Melissa Gilbert to come make home made jam with me.

I know these musings are completely geeky and over-blown, but for a suburban woman to just grow vegetables all summer feels fantastic. Each day I would step outside to water and would look at the garden and think “holy cow, this really works, those seeds really grew.” And when I would go to our grocery store I would stand in the produce section and look around and would be stunned to realize that I really did not need anything.

So as we snapped the last green bean off the plant. As I noticed the leaves turning brown. I got a little sad. We were wearing sweatshirts. The wind was blowing. I was suddenly imagining myself snowed in on the prairie in some blizzard, waiting for Pa to get home safe. Really, though, it will just be cold out. The garden is gone, the farmer’s market closes down in a few weeks. It’s back to the grocery store for a few months. I’m not Laura enough to have canned anything, but that is what next summer is for I suppose.

For now, we just said “bye-bye garden” and waved at our now crispy plants. We put the blue toy shovel away and headed inside. I’ve got a week’s worth of beans. A few days of tomatoes. kale, sage, basil, and mint are still hanging around. 

Other than that, no more gardening prairie mom for me. Just suburban supermarket mom. sigh.

Organic strawberries were $5.99 the other day at our local grocer. $5.99! Their more toxic twins, the non-organic variety, were on sale for $3.00. Darn this pesticide free living. I stood staring at that clamshell of bruised strawberries and fought with myself. The Farmer’s Market was still 3 days away. I really wanted those berries. How am I supposed to cough up the cash for organic berries when we need reasonable staples like bread, pasta and milk? 

Like the rest of the nation, my family sits inside a belt that has tightened strongly since this little economy of ours slid into a ditch last year. Increasing living costs, a husband who works in manufacturing, three growing kids and me, the wife who sort of works. We are not exactly poster children for extravagant living. But neither are most people I know these days.

And since we are clearly not alone in our efforts to streamline our spending, I often hear friends and others mock the very ideas of shopping locally, eating organically, or even dropping in for fresh bread at a local bakery. They, understandably, moan that these sorts of efforts are expensive. They are perceived as the luxury of middle to upper class, over-educated urbanites who still have the time and money to flaunt their trips to Whole Foods. The rest of us, they say, must stock up at the value grocers and do whatever it takes to survive.

It’s not that families I know wouldn’t love a pesticide free head of lettuce, but seriously, when money is tight, who can manage to buy earth friendly school supplies, fair trade coffee, or organic produce? Well, glad you asked, and even if you didn’t, here we go.

I think that what lands in our grocery carts tells an interesting tale. On the one hand, we balk at an extra three bucks for organic berries, and on the other we cannot live without a 24 pack of our favorite soda (I feel the pain, Diet Coke and I have been together for years). Perhaps we can drink water and buy those berries? This whole green eating and living thing is actually about spending LESS money. It is about rearranging our spending rather than increasing it. It’s about skipping some of the not-so-healthy options, like soda and fruit snacks, to make the planet-friendly options doable.

It is also about a holistic approach to living. For example, our oldest son has “seasonal” allergies. When we use earth and people friendly cleaning products, he sneezes less, much less. So we don’t end up spending a small fortune on children’s allergy medication or going to his doctor to check in. No copays, no Claritin, just an almost sneeze free kid, leaving us a bit of money to buy those products that made this difference.

When I live a little lighter on the planet I do not spend money on paper products, disposable cutlery, bottles of water, saran wrap and aluminum foil and all the other kitchen accoutrements that people have survived thousands of years without. Seems to me that millions of people around the world somehow survive a BBQ without take ‘n’ toss containers or paper plates. So if we use less of these items we can afford to support our local grower, who may actually be cheaper than the grocery store anyway. If we skip these items, maybe we can pay a buck extra for a pound of coffee that has been grown and traded fairly. This means that while we have been trying to make our own ends meet, we’ve helped another family in Brazil or Kenya to do the same. Seems fair to me. Why should I be able to meet my needs at the expense of theirs?

I’ve got a big mouth and end up sharing these thoughts in lots of circles. Some are happy to hear them and others write me off as an idyllic suburbanite who needs to get her head out of organic produce and into the real world. But whatever one might say that real world is, is often as interested in this healthier way of being as the rest of us. For example, two friends run a local food pantry and they shared with me how all the organic produce and fresh food that is contributed there flies out the door by 10:00 am. That people line up by 5:30 am on a Saturday to get their hands on fresh, healthy stuff.

I am a part of a new little team of people who are working toward some urban gardening solutions in an impoverished neighborhood in Chicago. There is tons of energy and excitement about people finding their way to healthy alternatives. I am well aware that some kids have never tasted a fresh blueberry. But they should get this chance. They should have access to a plot of land that can grow and nourish their neighborhood. They should get a shot at organic gardening and produce rather than the cans and boxes handed out at local pantries. 

So when I find myself standing in the produce aisle, about to vomit over the increasing cost of healthy options, I remind myself that if I can somehow rearrange our budget those berries just might be doable. And frankly, sometimes they just are not, so I skip them or buy the toxic variety. But if I can manage to tweak a few things, perhaps I can help others to do the same. And if they just cannot afford it at all, then maybe I can plunge my hands into the dirt of a difficult neighborhood and bring some good things to life. I have friends gardening in the hood, cooking food for kids in poverty, stocking food pantries with locally grown produce, gardening to give it away. After making all the changes they could, these people still had needs. People I know are rising to meet them.

Together, maybe we can afford that, and can help others to afford it too.

I think I have a bit of a gardening debacle coming up. Too soon to tell for sure but if all I have been told comes true, I am about to wrestle with the radishes. I’ve dabbled in gardening on and off over the past 5 years or so. Sort of the way I dabble in exercise or cleaning my house. Lots of good intentions but not so much in the way of follow through. I do enough to be in shape and not have crumbs stuck to my socks, but this is about as far as it goes.

So it was with gardening until this year. A few Roma tomatoes here and a basil plant there. As long as I could make one batch of bruscetta from my back yard I considered myself a success. But this year I am focusing my eco-energies on growing my own. So there’s a lot of green going on outside my kitchen window. But as a rookie with three kids there are some problems on the horizon.

It started a few weeks ago right after I dropped sugar snap pea, string bean, and radish seeds into the ground. A few days later there were little green sprigs poking through the dirt. It did not occur to me that something my hands actually planted could grow. I saw the green and mumbled about the weeds and started pulling “baby weeds” out of the ground. It wasn’t until I realized that I was pulling an orderly row of these from the ground that I discovered I was pulling up my radishes. I quickly smashed them back into the dirt. oops.

A few days later I was planting the carrots. My daughter (18 months) and middle son (3) were watching me. And by watching me I mean they followed me right into the dirt. They of course did not know that I carefully watched my steps to get where I was so they stepped right on the radishes that were still reeling from the other day. Time for a distraction, I grabbed them a container of bubbles.

This got them out of the garden and onto the lawn where they were able to blow lots of bubbles while I planted carrots. Did you know that carrot seeds are very, very small? And that they get stuck to wet, muddy garden gloves? And that they can even blow away when it is windy? Did you also know that an 18 month old with a bubble wand could care less that she is walking all over the neighbors driveway and heading for the street? And did you know that a mom panicked about her daughter running into the street will pour roughly 1/3 of a package of carrot seeds into just one little hole? And then flustered, she will drop the remaining 2/3 of the package into maybe 4 more holes?

This can happen.

Do you know what else can happen? That same 18 month old can decide to pour all her bubbles onto your radishes.

Shortly thereafter your almost 6 year old can come outside and step on the peas as he yells at you because he just realized that the bubbles that I gave the baby where his.

After shouts and whining about the injustice of the bubbles we all traipsed inside and cleaned up. I watered things later and then decided to sit back and see what would happen.

Funny thing is, it all is growing. Radishes and all. The carrots look like small patches of grass, there are lots of them in a little space. But peas, carrots, radishes, tomatoes etc., it is all coming up. Despite my disastrous, rookie efforts, the earth actually produces food! Which is just amazing to me. It should not be. But it is. It is sort of like my fascination with the human body (of which I know basically nothing), but I do know it has an amazing ability to heal and to fight disease and to transform itself into what is needed to survive.

Things grow. Which gives me great hope as a mama who wants this planet to keep growing. We can indeed overcome some of the ecological tragedies that we have brought upon ourselves. With the right effort, trails can be restored, old strip malls can be reconverted to wild spaces, landscapes can be spruced up. It can happen. If course it is never restored to its fullest beauty. Just like those radishes will have a tinge of bubbly taste to them perhaps. But with all the heartbreaking news on the environmental front, it is nice to know that radishes still grow under the foot of a baby girl. 

So this summer, grow something. Clean up something. Pick up a local trail. When you hike, grab a candy wrapper that someone else let loose and toss it out. Join a trail clean up day. Pick up trash at the park. Get rid of unwanted rocks and concrete and give something wild space to grow. Plant some radishes.

Things grow. We stop them all the time and while we have undoubtedly reached the point in history where we will have things and places that never grow again. There is a glimmer of hope to be found in the backyard on occasion. Hold on to that. As the Dixie Chicks would say (and i so cannot believe I am about to quote the Dixie Chicks) “grow something wild and unruly.”

I spent Mother’s Day Weekend in Wisconsin. I love it there. I know that most of the people there probably hate me and my type, but I love it there. My type are the hoards of stressed out urbanites from Chicago (a metropolitan area of 9.5 million) who race across the border every Friday afternoon for a glimpse of pine trees and dreams of catching a Walleye. We clog their highways, trespass on their land, and make vacation property unaffordable for some. I understand their disdain. But like most of them, I also like Brett Favre so I am hoping they will cut me some slack.

My Dad and Mom have a place up there. So we went. It was relaxing. We ate lots of cheese and sat around for three days. Ahhhh. I ventured out for a run on Saturday and could not help but comment on something I saw. Lawn ornaments. Lawn ornaments everywhere. Wooden wishing wells, kissing dutch people, wind socks, mailboxes that looked like giant Bass fish. I even saw a healthy dose of pink flamingos. I mostly thought these were the domain of Floridians and Jimmy Buffet fans, but apparently not. I am not a lawn ornament person so I may be stepping on some toes here. Sorry for that. When we moved into our current home we found two of those kissing dutch people behind the garage. We are saving them for a prank. Look out.

Why do we find it necessary to decorate the outdoors? Now I do not have pink flamingos but I have my share of mulch and other details designed to make my lawn look all pretty. I am clearly not against growing things and bringing life to our land, but I am just curious to know why we feel the urge to pretty it all up? Like God did not do it right so we need to add a faux plastic deer or a sign that says “Bears Fans Live Here.”

I struggle here for two reasons. One, I think the world is quite pretty the way it is. That if we actually garden and plant with the species that are native to our area, they thrive. We don’t need to water them as much, they grow well because they are supposed to grow well there. And this means I can stand back with my hands on my hips and think that I did a good job when really Little Bluestem just grows well in these prairie states.

The other reason is landfills. Where does the faded flamingo with a missing wing go? To the landfill. Things that are outside wear down quicker. They have to weather the winter snow and the summer sun. They get brittle. They break. They start to leak. They fall apart. And then we chuck them into the trash and they go off to the landfill. 

I wonder if there is a way to dress up the lawn without the trash, the kitsch. What if we just let it all look like it was supposed to? Now I recognize that if I let my grass turn into a waist high prairie this summer I will be asked to leave my community, but someplace between the lawn and the lawn ornaments there has to be a middle ground. Maybe lawn ornaments that help local wildlife or grass that is native?

I’m a rookie gardner so perhaps I am out of line here, but this was my gut after passing no less than 5 ceramic deer and geese on my run this past Saturday.