To Repair Our Lives - Mid November, 2021

ALL SOULS (Saints) DAY, part II -- A Story:

The broad squash leaves, fragrant basil leaves, upright corn stalks, vining tomato and potato plants have yellowed, browned, and blackened with the diminishing sunlight and arrival of frosts. Meanwhile the collard greens are bright rich green - sweetening with the frost and first snow.

And the garden ghosts dance - playing in the fierce lake winds, getting the last laugh as scattered seeds unknown to the farmer home themselves in the fall garden soil.

Ms. Emma Olive Martin was born in South Carolina in 1940. She was the baby of the family - Daddy’s favorite. Hers was a large singing laughing dark-skinned family. They prayed hard, played hard, worked hard, and Mama and Daddy applied the switch hard if the children acted up. They worked the cotton fields for white landowners. Well, most of them worked the cotton fields. According to her sisters and brothers, young Emma often got out of field work by fainting right there in the rows of cotton. The family migrated north to the “land of milk and honey” - St. Paul, Minnesota (in January!) - when Emma was 15. She never forgot the hardship of being the only black student in her school and the humiliation of her rural sharecropping background. She worked hard to get as far as possible from every scent and sign of that life. She never got over it. She worked for decades in nursing facilities. (“You care for people” Morgan Freeman said when he was introduced to her.) Over sixty years later, she still wanted nothing to do with the farm, with that past.

Emma was my aunt. Unpartnered, no children of her own, she sheltered me and my siblings and many cousins in our most homeless young adult years, including one of us for decades until his death. ...Our second Mama with the big wigs, the big jewelry, the big fashion sweaters (after the worn thin down-south wardrobe) sported a dry silliness with a little girl's laugh.

She refused to cross the waters to visit Diaspora Gardens, even as she was regaled with stories from her sister, my mother, Susie who lived with us in the summers. She was adamant: "Mmmmm - mmm... sounds too much like the farm life we got away from."

Then, ever unpredictable, as she was dying Aunt Emma requested that her ashes be brought across the waters of Lake Superior to Diaspora Gardens. We giggled in disbelief, "Aunt Emma, you never visited once!" But she was clear and certain. What she couldn’t do in life, she was determined to do in whatever permanence death offers. Perhaps somehow my living back into the life of food and land in a reparative grateful way, brought healing and freedom to Aunt Emma’s story with tending land. Perhaps.

And it circles around. The Collards I grow are descendant of collards enslaved Africans made into a staple for the southern United States. They cultivated the greens for a few centuries to yield what now grows, self-seeding itself in a corner of Diaspora Gardens. It’s Aunt Emma’s family-only patch: the greenness rising tall and broad on it’s own each year, reminiscent of a long-ago South Carolina garden. It holds Aunt Emma’s ghost homing me and the gardens into her sacrificial love and care. And the garden, homing her.

The collard greens lean over in their slow pre-winter dance. Soon they will be part of a family meal. Amidst the steam rising from Thanksgiving feast table, Emma stories will have us laughing and loud together - surrounded by ghosts of seed, soil, and souls homing and repairing Aunt Emma, Grandma Connies, Great Grandpa Addison, each of us at the table, and those yet to come.

Giving honor to the saints / souls / ghosts / memories / Spirit which teach us to sow healing and repair before, behind, beyond and within ourselves.

- regina

Regina LarocheNovember 18, 2021