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Sold in the shops

For the people to eat,

Sold in the shops of

Stupidity Street.

I saw in vision

The worm in the wheat,

And in the shops nothing

For people to eat;

Nothing for sale in

Stupidity Street.

Papa was not alone in his concerns. The previous fall, the inaugural issue of The Whole Earth Catalog had put on its cover the first photo of Earth taken from space, giving humans a new perspective on the beautiful and surprisingly fragile orb of blue and green, and as a result, the first Earth Day, planned for that April 1970, would be celebrated by 20 million Americans across the country.

As Mama and Papa worked in the garden that spring, other news drifted in bits and snatches over the battery-powered radio that sat on the patio by the house: “One hundred thousand protesters march against the Vietnam War in Washington, D.C. . . . Apollo 13 aborts mission to moon. . . . Four students at Kent State shot by national guardsmen during a protest over Cambodia.” Then came the musical outcry of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water,” at number one on the charts, and Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” drifting across the airwaves.

It wasn’t until the weather report came on that Papa ran to the patio and turned up the volume, hoping temperatures would be warm enough to plant seedlings outside, and ultimately, put food on the table. While the songs and struggles of the outside world were hopeful, the requirements for survival in the woods were, by necessity, Papa’s primary concern.

Or so it seemed at the time. Looking back, I see our isolated farm as the small dewdrop on the vast web, and Papa’s individual goal to grow his own organic vegetables as part of a greater shift in the world, spreading like a chain reaction along the strands. Rachel Carson’s concerns over chemical agriculture led in effect to Papa’s desire to grow his own food, and his example and that of other organic pioneers would be followed by a trickle of oddballs, but a trickle that grew until, as the Y2K book The Tipping Point explains, it tipped, and today the word organic is mainstream.

Small drops, we see, like raindrops on stone, can eventually change the course of a river. These small forces, too, can change the path of a life.

Starting seedlings was Papa’s favorite part of the job, hopeful as it was to watch those tiny green leaves emerging from the brown potting soil.

“Come on up, little one,” he’d say, patting his lap when I hung nearby. I’d climb into the hum of his concentrated excitement, my head under his chin and body in the cave of his arms as his callused hands tap-tap-tapped the card-size envelopes to drop seeds into the loamy potting mix. He’d spent the long winter poring over seed catalogs, settling on thirty-five crops best suited to our climate and soil and sending in order forms with creased dollar bills from under the couch for payment.

Papa shared with Mama from his reading: “Vegetables are similar to flowers, sending messages to our eyes that we should eat them, the way flowers send messages to the bees to pollinate them.” The orange of carrots and squashes indicated beta-carotene for the eyes, the dark green of spinach held calcium for bones, and the reds of tomatoes meant lycopene for the heart.

Papa mixed extravagant potting soils from peat, compost, and soil with the care of someone preparing baby food. He whistled with contentment as he cut cedar logs to make into flats, or “borrowed” and modified Herrick’s wooden blueberry boxes left in the field across the road. Soon, these flats filled with potting soil and germinating seeds covered every sunny window ledge, every counter, and all the floor space as well as the beds of the new greenhouse built onto the front of the house.

It didn’t escape me that in spring Papa spent more time with his plants than with me. Perhaps that’s why, once I could walk, I felt compelled to leave my perfect little footprints marching across his newly seeded flats on the floor. The smoothed soil was sand on the beach, calling