This Place of Wonder (29)

That is the farming life. Unpredictable. Plants are living things, vulnerable to all kinds of threats—storms, insects, fungi, and more and more often, fire. Today, a crew works along the perimeter, chopping out scrub and grasses for fire mitigation to give us a chance if an ordinary sort of blaze sweeps down the mountains. Nothing can stop a firestorm of the sort that has become more common in recent years, but we do our best. The hills are tinder after a dry winter, and the Santa Anas will start blowing in a couple of months. All it takes is a spark—lightning, a bad muffler, an arsonist with a match—to gulp down vast swaths of land. The past five years have been a horror up and down the state, through the whole West, really. We are learning to live with the threat of catastrophe, like lobsters in a pot on the stove.

A small crew is packing up strawberries that were harvested early this morning and loading crates into trucks for delivery to various restaurants. I wave and the crew leader waves back. A man is bent over a central irrigation unit with wrenches and screwdrivers to fix a problem that showed up last week.

I herd Cosmo and Elvis into the house, and stop to give the other animals some love, kissing the cats and rubbing Joe the ancient border collie’s soft belly. My assistant, Tanesha, works in the office attached to the house, so they have plenty of attention, but they miss me anyway.

I poke my head into the office. “How’s everything?”

“Good. We’re supposed to be at the grade school in two hours. Will you be ready?”

“Sure. I’ll just pop in the shower.”

“I had a phone call from the Carpinteria police,” Tanesha says, turning to offer me a slip of paper. “They want to talk to you again about Augustus. I told them we’d be that direction this afternoon, and they said that would be fine. Just stop in. Ask for the guy on the paper.”

I frown, feeling a ripple of unease. “Did they say why?”

“No.”

“Did they say if they’ve released the body?” I hold the paper lightly between my thumb and index finger. “Rory is not coping very well.”

“He didn’t say.” She clicks a program closed on the computer and swings around to face me. Her feet are bare beneath a pair of well-worn khakis, and her ankles are dusty from working in the fields earlier. A pale line shows where her socks stopped. “How’s Maya?”

“Okay, I think.” A rippling sting reminds me of her request that I leave her alone. “I worry that she’s not very stable yet, and she doesn’t want me living there, but . . . it’s early days.”

“People do get sober, Meadow.”

“Do they?” I ask, mostly rhetorically. I think of Maya the night she called me to come pick her up from the winery. I couldn’t go by myself because I couldn’t drive that far along the coast at night with my bad eyes. I called the only person I could, her father. He drove us there in the dark night. He was the one who helped her up from the ground, where she’d more or less passed out, covered in wine, her hair stiff with it. I could only weep, shattered by her crash.

Thinking of it, my heart aches. I would spare her this, all of it, the deep suffering of addiction, the losses she’s racked up, take it all on myself so that she could have a life of happiness and joy. Pressing a palm to my diaphragm, I take a breath. “I just want her to be okay.”

“You can’t do it for her.”

I take a breath. “I’m trying. I just haven’t seen people be successful that often, and to lose her dad like this, right before she gets out . . . I mean.”

“She has tools. She can do it.” Her hands are folded in her lap. “Have you looked up Al-Anon meetings yet?”

I shake my head.

“I’d offer to find a list of meetings, but I think that’s something you need to do yourself when you’re ready.”

“Yeah.” I lift a hand. “I’m off to shower.”



When Augustus and I pooled our talents and passions, our fortunes rose like a comet. The book I wrote out of an overflowing sense of love for both the farm-to-table movement and all the things Augustus and I were creating together became a bestseller and went back to print over and over. Peaches and Pork became an It destination, worth the trip from cities north and south to sample the tender wares of Augustus Beauvais, whose star rose right along with mine.

Money poured in. I wanted to use some of it to create projects that would teach the concepts we believed in—sustainable food, ecology, eating from local gardens. We admired Alice Waters’s Edible Schoolyard Project, and after much discussion, we settled on the Plant It Forward foundation, which helps create community and school gardens in challenged neighborhoods up and down the central coast. It has been very successful and, after almost twenty years, has gained national attention and provided models for other regions and cities.

I’ve learned to share some of the administrative tasks with other people, and some of the community outreach, but I never tire of working with a gaggle of kids on a plot of land. There’s something sacred about growing food, about planting seeds and watching them sprout, about pulling a radish from the warm earth, about harvesting an ear of corn and popping it into a pot. I taught Rory and Maya to garden, as my mother taught me, and now I teach other children.

This morning, Tanesha and I drive to Hermosa Elementary, located in a neighborhood of battered ranch homes too far from the ocean or the mountains to be gentrifying. With funds from Plant It Forward, they’ve plowed a large section of playground under and this spring planted their first crops. I like to regularly visit the newest urban farms to make sure we catch problems early, and this is one of my babies this year. The first project leader disappeared halfway through the plowing, and we scrambled to find another member of the community who would be willing to take it on. A young teacher volunteered and has been doing a great job, but I know she’s in a little over her head.