Craft projects on military bases are frighteningly neat, like stuff you see on a Pinterest board. It makes me weep with a misplaced sense of inadequacy. I have a sneaking suspicion that their process may be more science than art, but--like most insecurities--I have no real data to back up my hunch. It's like that unfounded feeling that all pretty movie actresses have smooth, perfect bodies under their Hollywood clothes or that the kids at the private school in the nicer part of town than yours will all get into good universities and be your kids' bosses one day (I just earwormed myself with the song from 'Weeds'--"little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky...").
Even with all our rambling around from motel to casita to guest house in December and January, packing and unpacking our crates every day, I did not learn the place-for-everything technique so critical to an orderly life. Military families live the disciplined lives of warriors. They are ready for anything. They mobilize on command and take all their children with them, ranked by height or age or in alphabetical order or however they did it in 'The Sound of Music'. They are probably not meat. If they ever die, they do it with dignity and handsome corpses full of formaldehyde and open caskets so everyone can see how tidy they were to the very end.
Cauliflowers also pickle well and have beautiful corpses. Actually, ours are fermented and they are not really dead. Oh... Uh... Undead? Have we have been eating cauliflower zombies all this time? It's alive! (Apparently, so is my hair.)
We, unlike military families and other pickles, are still meat. Tough sometimes, and chewy, totally unfit for an easy meal or a proper display after our messy lives get the better of us. We are more art than science. We are the chaos of creation and destruction. We settle in and dig it up wherever we are, even if it's only for a night, because our time with this earth is so heartbreakingly short. Also, we have big giant desert hair, okay?
Besides growing very large hair, we are also attempting flowers and vegetables.
I think I planted purple zinnia seeds, but the unscientific method I employ while playing in the dirt will make everything a surprise later. Perhaps they're the red and orange ones, or those marigold seeds. Whatever comes up, I hope hummingbirds like it and bugs do not.
In this spirit of settling in, we are doing some stuff that could hurt to leave behind, and in the spirit of staying agile, we are designing as we go, trying for a portable garden, and starting with seeds, dirt, a hilarious little thrift store baby cradle, and old US Dept of Defense crates that used to house missile motors in scary tubes. Reclaiming old materials in the desert is fun, and maybe this is our interpretation of Isaiah 2:4. We are hammering swords into plowshares in our twentieth century kind of way. Okay, sure, it's the twenty-first century, but life is slow here--give us a minute. We're still cycling through materials from wars of the last millenium. Vintage wars call for heirloom seeds.
As I sign off, there is a kale seedling sprouting in its tiny pocket of dirt, a hummingbird sipping at the red sugar trough, and there exists now a middle of the night doodle full of ideas about what we are really doing in Tucson and why we care. We head back to Seattle next week to collect our tools, tables, machines, dry goods, and excess (O! The excess) belongings. We still seek the balance between letting go and digging in, between evolution and taking root, and we keep returning to the knowledge that we can't think our way through to the end of this. You can't iterate on nothing--you just have to start somewhere, do something, plant something, build something, grow something, make something, get it wrong if you must (and you must), and learn something. For the love, we've got to learn something.
