Sixty Plants + a Coffee Can

This past year was my first year as an “empty-nester” + technically my first time in my entire life living “alone”. At Forty-something years old, I was alone for the very first time ever.

So much has changed in the last ten years going from living in a 4 bedroom 3.5 bath house with a garden that I spent most of my mornings + afternoons tending; to living in a cute 2 bedroom apartment with a little patio that I grow herbs in large coffee containers. Both spaces, held my heart + held me together at different phases of my life.

I have deep roots to the earth, to land + to North Carolina. My people were enslaved in Eastern North Carolina + later my grandparents were sharecroppers of the land. Working land that they never got to truly own, for a small percentage that someone else calculated for them. When my grandparents passed away, the land was tied up in so much red tape that Nash County essentially took hold of the property (a tale as old as time).

My parents created a childhood home for me + my siblings nestled on three acres of land out in the country. That’s where I grew up. Gardening, planting, working in my outside kitchen, creating potions, dirt under my nails + stains on my clothes. It wasn’t an activity or a game that somebody taught me or signed me up for. It was just me. Its simply where I was in life.

Then I went off to college, had a baby + was far away from the country, the land + myself. Time moved quickly + slowly during those years as I navigated who I was becoming. I met someone, got married + then poof I was in a whole house with a whole garden. Sixty-plus plants inside. They each had a name + I knew every one of them. Those 8 years were like a fever dream. A combination of something I felt I lost (the land) + the process of giving up something I loved (myself).

Then I got a divorce. I lost the garden + gained myself.

Truth Moment? Losing that garden hurt in a place I didn’t expect. That area of my life hurt more than the lost of the relationship. I could talk about the house, the marriage, the whole rearranging of my life, but the reality, standing in an apartment with no patch of land, that’s the one that took me some time to move past.

So I put thyme in a coffee can. Lavender in a terracotta pot.

Honestly I didn’t think of it as anything at the time. It was just what I had + a way for me to feel like I didn’t loose everything. As I write this now I can see four generations from start to finish ending up in the same place. Back to the land, back to the dirt.

They returned to the land. Then they returned again. And now here I am returning myself. This is how we have always kept things growing.

The inheritance was never about just the physical acreage. It was never gonna be about acreage, because who are we kidding, acreage kept getting taken. The inheritance was always the knowing. Which plant does what, which herb pairs well for this ailment. When to apply, steep or put it in. How to keep something alive in whatever container you’ve got.

Information like that travels. It cannot be repossessed or even suppressed.

My grandmother was born in 1926. At home with midwives + her mother’s sisters in the room. Not in a hospital. Not with strangers in a cold room. She was born surrounded with women who knew her mother’s name, in a house, doing what women had done in our family + community for generations.

I had my daughter in 2006. I was twenty-two. I was alone in a hospital. People talked at me instead of to me. I said things were wrong + was not believed. My delivery ended in an emergency C-section nobody had prepared me for. I was home for only seven days before we were readmitted to the NICU for fourteen more days where my baby was fed through a tube. Once we came home, my grandmother was right there to meet + care for us.

Two generation.

1926: surrounded by women who knew her

2006: alone in a room full of strangers

I’m not sharing this as a personal misfortune. This is more so a reflection as I look back at the last year of my life + acknowledgment of what happened in one family over an eighty year span.

One thing that I wish I knew, was the name of the woman who caught my grandmother in 1926. There isn’t a way of me ever knowing that because there isn’t anyone left in my family to ask.

That’s what erasure actually looks like in the end. Its not dramatic. There isn’t a scene. It can be as simple as a name that stopped getting said until the last person who knew it was gone.

I didn’t know that any of this had a name until recently.

Alice Walker wrote In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens back in 1983 + the title all by itself tells you everything this novel could be about, the gardens + what Black women grew when they owned nothing else. Delores Williams made the connection + comparison of what gets done to Black women’s bodies to what gets done to the earth. Melanie Harris took things even further + gave it a word: eco-womanism. Before now I had been describing this as “eco-memory”, what your body + your people remember about land. There is no denying that tradition as a whole is living in our cells.

I have been practicing this my entire life without ever knowing what it truly was.

I want to be honest about the duality + complications with the land; because it would be really easy to make this pretty about putting plants in cans + sitting on the patio drinking wine. The reality is for a lot of us, land is not neutral. We see crops + we recall hard labor without consent. Tress used for hanging. Families being ripped apart. Some of us flinch at farms, at the woods + camping. That flinch is not irrational, it is memory.

Both things are true at once. The wound + the reverence.

What I know now is the coffee can + terracotta pot was not a sad little consolation garden. It was the tradition doing what tradition has always done. Shrinking down to whatever size it had to be. Waiting for expansion.

My grandmother had a room full of women. I had a coffee can, terracotta pot + some thyme.

Neither one of us was ever actually starting from nothing. That’s the beauty of my lineage. Resilience + growing into something new is what we have always done + always will do.

XOXO

Denawa Deniece