Recreating Eden

My parents are fast becoming full-fledged urban homesteaders. Each time I make the five minute drive between my in-laws' house, where my husband and I live with three empty rooms, his sister's golden retriever, and a plastic astroturf lawn, and my parent's home, I always anticipate some strange new development. It all started with a garden – a seemingly simple, normal idea. My dad decided to grow one after I announced I was going vegan halfway through my cancer treatments. Seeing his only daughter bald with a surgery wound circumnavigating half her torso rekindled my dad's dream to grow his own organic food. He bought some books off the internet, reminisced about the garden his parents grew outside his childhood home before they had to sell, and typed out a seasonal vegetable lists.

Growing a vegetable garden to feed a family of seven turned out to be a huge endeavor, which required more than a leisurely Sunday afternoon spent tootling around the sun-drenched rows of glistening tomatoes. Yet, the dream had already taken root in my parents souls, barring all sorts of go-green, hippie-loving practices. I'm not sure when I realized the garden wouldn't be just a garden in the traditional sense, but the birth of a new era in our family history. Maybe it was the appearance of Mother Earth Magazine and The Farmer's Almanac casually replacing the National Geographic Magazines and Woman's Days on the coffee table. The bookshelves also morphed, displaying a plethora of green bindings with titles like Choosing Simplicity and Clean Green. My mom offered to let me borrow them as she walked from the bathroom to the kitchen armed with a spray bottle full homemade cleaning solution consisting mainly of vinegar, baking soda, and tea tree oil.

The day I pulled up into the driveway behind my dad's truck stacked high with hay bales, I knew my brothers were in for a world of good-old-fashion work. I found them all out back on their hands and knees digging in the dirt, which they had already spent weeks weeding and churning up with a rototiller. A rock-rising bucket sat an arm-distance from each of them. The plopped pebbles in to be cleaned for my dad's soon-to-be-designed rock garden. Each boy had some sort of digging instrument, ranging from trowels to hoes, and they were yanking up the massive network of roots left behind by the long-gone lawn. Our six-toed orange cat, my father's faithful companion in all his activities, was rolling in the dirt next to my dad as if he were the result of cross-breeding between a faithful, lazy farm dog and a chinchilla. Their suburban backyard had become a portal to Oklahoma farm lands during the dust bowl, nothing green in sight.

My dad grinned up at me from beneath the shade of his straw hat. He gestured to the dirt with pride and asked me how I thought the garden was coming along. The five boxes he had constructed out of the wood that was once meant to become our playground sat waiting to be used on the patio. I retreated inside before someone could hand me a shovel. As I started dinner, my mom showed off the sprouts she had been growing in the cupboard. She snatched up and sliced the avocado peel and bell pepper innards that I discarded. She went into the backyard to dump these remains into the compost pile and returned with a few fresh cut herbs from her very own mini, picnic-table-top garden. Then, she started talking about chickens.

My brothers and I have spent weeks since trying to convince her that her beloved chihuahua and miniature fox terrier would playfully rip any chickens to pieces. Still, she cuts DIY chicken coop designs out of magazines and leaves them around for my youngest and most-likely-to-succeed-at-wood-working brother, Jacob. He isn't taking the bait, he would rather take his bow and arrows into the backyard to attach the hay bales, stacked and waiting to be dismantled. We try to tell her the dogs will slip under the chicken-wire and get their little faces pecked and scratched. Our gruesome warnings and reminders that chickens are most likely against home owners regulations are to no avail. She has already picked out names, Ginger and Red, and is thoroughly convinced of their value as garden-aiding pets. She is lost in dreams of their little beaks delicately plucking insects off lettuce leaves. She can already hear the soothing sounds of calm clucking and idle dirt scratching as they mill around the yard. No dark visions can successful cloud her sunny suburban homestead dreams.

I try not to worry too much. There are way worse habits and hobbies my parents could indulge in now that they will soon only have one child at home. Having a designated bucket to catch water while the shower is warming up or buying canisters of live lady bugs at the farmer's market can't be that strange. Besides, any day now, we won't have to battle the crowds in florescent-lit aisles searching for something that resembles food. We will be able to eat our vegetables straight out of the dirt still pulsing with the sun's life and energy. Perhaps, we will never be able to go back to supermarket produce after we have tasted the fresh reward of my brothers' and dad's hard work. We will be able to sit down in the evening to a salad and homemade soup completely prepared by each member of the family instead of individually eating microwaved meals over the sink in shifts. This promise of a garden reminds me that people are meant to live together, children help parents, neighbors offering a hand, dogs and chickens learning to coexist in harmony. We are not suited for this life of convenience foods and mini-mansions where four-person families lose each other in the great vacuums of privacy. Real life is made of dirt, sunshine, and the pursuit of crazy dreams. After all, paradise is a garden.