“A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

J. D. Salinger died a few months ago at the age of 91, and his demise sent ripples of speculation through the publishing world. His famous novel Catcher in the Rye was a sensation when it was published in 1951. It achieved a gradual and building success that by the 1960s drove Salinger to retreat to a farm house in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he remained – raising his family and writing, but not publishing – for the duration of his life.

By the time I was born in 1969, J. D. Salinger was already a legend. I grew up knowing two things about him – that he wrote The Catcher in the Rye, and that he had essentially dropped off the face of the earth. He was that astonishing and unbelievable anomaly in the publishing world – the “sure thing” writer who refused to cash in his chips. I read all of his books about twenty years ago, and I remember liking them at the time, but they were not literary-life-altering for me. I’ve been an aspiring novelist all of my life and Salinger was never one of the writers who inspired me ... with one small exception. Writer’s magazines and web sites and agent’s blogs all tell us that in the present state of publishing it is now a writer’s responsibility to bring an audience “to the table” along with their manuscript, and it is within this context that I have always been fascinated by the idea of Salinger’s reserve; by his ability to not participate in the fray. What inspires me about J. D. Salinger is his apparent conviction that a writer’s only obligation is to write – a conviction in him that seems to have been attached to a real affinity for home.

* * * * *

Home must be something that Salinger understood very well. He refused to put art before life, I assume because he recognized and respected the complex relationship between them; because he knew that they were not – that they could not be – mutually exclusive. Eulogistic pieces in The New Yorker suggest that he was not technically a recluse, as we’ve been led to believe. He simply refused to be what he said most writers are nowadays, “book-selling louts and big mouths.”

Lillian Ross, Salinger’s friend for over fifty years, quotes him talking about taking his children to ride on the flying swings at the Cornish Fair, where he said he would “stand around and talk about schools with the other crummy parents, the summer parents.” She says he found “fun and relief” traveling down to New York to have dinner with her and another mutual friend. In the same issue John Seabrook, a friend of Matthew Salinger (J. D. Salinger’s son), describes an evening when Matthew invited him and his girlfriend to the Salinger home to watch movies. Salinger made them popcorn and sat behind them with “his face illuminated by the flickering projector.” Salinger and Seabrook later played golf together. On another day they spent “a wonderful afternoon ... going around San Francisco’s Chinatown, looking at exotic mushrooms, roots, and herbs.”

I suspect that Salinger wasn’t misanthropic or reclusive so much as he refused to participate in the false syllogism that is inevitably thrust upon the famous; that is, that we mistake a person’s creativity or creations for who that person is. An artist or writer or musician can create something with which he or she has a profound connection; and we can connect with a created work that has a profound impact on us. But this is not a syllogism. It does not necessarily follow that we will experience a profound personal connection with that artist or writer or musician, or that we might even like them. We are not our creative work. The work often goes out into the world and represents us – and in the modern world, especially in the publishing industry, we are increasingly called upon to engender and encourage this. But it cannot contain the sum total of us. It is no conduit to whether we are optimistic or argumentative; to whether we are strict vegans or fast food junkies. It has no bearing on the volume at which we spit out our toothpaste.

This, I think, is something that J. D. Salinger got. He refused to entertain spurious claims of relationship. He refused to yield to the teleological pressure of the publishing world or the public. He wanted to write, and he wanted to be at home – though it may be, as Wendell Berry says, “filled with a thousand irritations, worries, regrets for what has happened and fears for what may, trivial duties, meaningless torments.” Home is always now. It’s never the house we’re going to have, or the place we’re going to end up. Home is both where we are now and who we are now, in all of its – and our – imperfections. To be at home is to “let it be enough.”

It’s to file your manuscripts away in a safe if you have to.

* * * * *

I’ve recently discovered the essays of Wendell Berry, and Berry has quite a lot to say about the concept of home. Berry also actually has some interesting things in common with Salinger. Both men are very concerned with the quality of food. According to the John Seabrook essay I already mentioned, Salinger had an encyclopedic knowledge of mushrooms. It is rumored that Salinger’s late, unpublished work was largely about health and nutrition. Berry, of course, is known to people who care about such things as a voice of both passion and reason on subjects to do with American agriculture, and he is often quoted by Michael Pollan, a well-known writer on the subjects of safe, sustainable and healthy food. Like Salinger, Berry rejected the idea that a literary life was intrinsically urban; he rejected “the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well because unknown or unconsidered by the people who really matter – that is, the urban intellectuals,” those people that Salinger dubbed “the community of seriously hip observers,” which he described as “a scary and depressing thing.”

Both men chose as their highest value – both in their lives and in their work – to be at home.

The thing that they remind me is that writing is a practice – like Berry’s agrarianism; like dog obedience-training, or gardening; like meditation or yoga. It’s not end-oriented. There are milestones; triumphs; revelations; but there is no end – specifically there is no sustainable and ongoing end-state. I think that this is also the case with being at home – which is to be comfortable in our present shelters and incarnations. To truly be at home – in our material and in our creative lives – we have to let go of end-oriented thinking.

* * * * *

Here’s another false pressure that we put on our creative work. We tend to lean on it too much. We tend to burden it with transforming everything in our lives; particularly when the realization of our dreams is a long time coming. We think in terms of being “discovered.” In the geometry of our imaginations there is a distant point at which “things will be different.”

It escapes us, as we’re growing up, idolizing this person or that person, feeling a connection to them that overwhelms us, that our lives to do not come at us from outside of ourselves; that the world does not bring us our feelings, our attachments, our philosophies. How is it that we cannot fathom that we, too, might become famous and idolized and rich, and that these feelings, attachments and philosophies would not change?

At best the world might sustain them. At worst it could take them away.

The teleological mindset is a particularly human characteristic. It’s not just that we assume an end-point to things; it’s more that we assume an end which will not in fact be an end at all but more of an enduring end-state. It’s all too easy to think of the milestones in our lives this way – graduations, marriages, divorces, buying a home – as we look forward to these things we imagine that they will be enduring states of perfection; points after which we can have no problems, no vices, no worries.

I am guilty of this faulty teleological thinking in practically all areas. For example, I frequently find myself thinking things along the lines of this: when the house is finished, we will no longer have domestic problems. We’ll have more space therefore my daughter will clean up her toys, my husband and I will not snap at each other, the dogs will not bark, the floors will not get dirty. It’s ridiculous not to have these things now, which are all completely within our power to have; ridiculous to think that how and who and what we are is in any way dependent on things extrinsic to us. It’s true that domestic improvements – more space, more organization – can make life less stressful. But when we’re in the new space we’re still going to be us. We’ll be moving our problems into the space with us. So why not start working on being the better “us” now?

* * * * *

After a brief publishing career, Salinger’s writing became “art for art’s sake” – sort of. He apparently has a safe full of manuscripts, each one carefully labeled: publish/edit/don’t publish. To an extent he must have gone about this work as if no one would ever read another thing that he wrote; knowing that he would experience no appreciation – or criticism – of his work within his lifetime. But after all, he was J.D. Salinger. He had to know that he could keep whatever he wanted to himself when he was alive and still be guaranteed an audience after his death. So writing in obscurity could hardly have been the same experience as it is for someone actually obscure – like, for instance, myself.

But art for art’s sake is a misnomer. Art is never “for art’s sake”; it’s for the sake of the artist. As much as Salinger must have known that there would inevitably be an audience for his later work, he also must have written it essentially for himself. Or else, why do it? He would see no possible earthly recompense for his efforts. And if he could work that way – doing his work with no thought that it might free him from carrots or turnips or blacksmiths or markets – why can’t I? Why can’t everyone? Perhaps because in order to do our work this way we must be quiet; and our frenzied modern marketplace is a cacophony of competing noises; a never-ending contest to see who can shriek the loudest, who can shock the most, who can be the most outrageous and attract the most attention. It gives us the idea that to be successful in it we, too, have to yelp and yowl; we too must be flashy, colorful and shiny.

And yet, both Mr. Salinger and Mr. Berry – two men who have always utterly refused to shout – have also always had audiences.

* * * * *

In my opinion the possibility to actually touch a few people far outweighs any thrill that might be had by skimming along the surface of a few hundred thousand. A writer does not take root in the world by becoming popular and famous and rich. A writer doesn’t take root in the world at all. Ideas, characters, stories, places and all that any of these things might stand for take root in the world only by taking root in another human being, and another, and another. That is how great work in any field outlasts us. It is not because we are the loudest, or the fastest, or the wildest, but perhaps because we are the most quiet and unassuming; because we are content to explicate and murmur such truths as we have been able to discover and no more, without expecting that our lives be materially changed in return. Because our lives have already been materially changed; we wrote the book, after all. We worried at and discovered the truths that we murmur. We took them into ourselves not to escape the vicissitudes of life but to grow a better carrot or a better turnip; so that we might have a more profound conversation with our aunt or our cousin, so that we might trade at the market or the blacksmith with the currency not of forced labor but of our souls.

These are the comforts and encouragements that I find when I read Wendell Berry. And it’s the reason that though I was not moved as a young writer by Salinger’s fiction in the same way that I was moved by Dostoyevsky, by E.M. Forester, by Sinclair Lewis; still I am endlessly moved and encouraged – more so, perhaps – by Jerry Salinger the man. Because all of life is a practice; an endless challenging attempt to balance goals with acceptance; progress with stasis; hope with contentment.

And being at home is a practice too. It’s an ongoing challenge to balance making it better with letting it be.

Our first garden was an afterthought.

A few years ago the state of the economy – banks crashing, corporations folding and 401K values plummeting – had us more than a little concerned. That coupled with the possibility of continued unseasonable and unpredictable weather started us on a program of home emergency preparedness. We already owned a wood burning stove, though we’d taken it out when our daughter started toddling, and space issues had kept us from ever putting it back in the house (now we own two, and one of them IS in the house). Still, in the spring of 2008 we bought a couple cords of wood. If we needed it, we could always drag the stove back into the house, and if we had to do that, we’d have plenty of fuel for it. Recalling our four days without power after hurricane Isabel, we invested in a generator. After a number of devastating storms beginning with Katrina, FEMA and The Red Cross were advising people to have anywhere from 3 days to 2 weeks of food on hand at home at all times. So we began to research what was involved in a long term food storage program. We began to stock our cellar with canned goods and water, with grains and beans in 5 gallon buckets. And then one day, in the midst of all the frenetic and uneasy hoarding, I was standing in my cellar, looking at my number ten cans full of freeze-dried food, and I realized that we were going about this all wrong.

Real abundance lies not in accumulation but in replenishment.

So near the end of June in 2008, pretty much as an afterthought, I planted a small garden.

2008 – The Panic Garden

Using a shovel, I turned over a small rectangle of grass, about 80 square feet, right in the sunny middle of our back yard. I got four tomato plants from a big box store that I thought were Roma tomatoes but which turned out to be something more like oval-shaped cherry tomatoes. They grew to be only about thigh high, and produced pretty well all summer. I had an eggplant. It didn’t make it, of course. I have always had trouble growing eggplants. I had a Black Beauty zucchini from which I harvested a few baseball bat sized fruits before the vine borers got it. I had a small melon patch that produced quite well, and a few pumpkin plants that never got off the ground. I grew a gigantic and gangly okra plant that I could not keep up with harvesting. And that was pretty much it.

No planning went into this garden. No amendments went into the soil. I put some decorative fencing around it to keep the dogs out, and added rabbit guard to that the morning I went out there and caught the rabbits helping themselves to the buffet. I saw a few snakes come and go. That’s the first year we ever saw snakes in our yard. Was it the newly-installed woodpile? The new garden? Climate change? Who knows?

We harvested and ate what was there, and let the weeds grow wild. It was far from beautiful, but it was successful enough to be encouraging. We could do better. We could do more.

So I dug up another 80 square feet or so late that summer and planted a fall garden. It was a little more orderly. A little less crowded. A little less weedy. I had my first amazing taste of freshly picked broccoli and was in love. My cabbages didn’t make it and neither did my cauliflower, but I was harvesting and eating kale well into December.

I was inspired. I was ready to get serious.

That winter I was flipping through a Mother Earth News magazine and saw an advertisement for heirloom tomato plants that was irresistible to me. I ordered them, along with a variety of peppers. I got online and had a few seed catalogs sent to the house. I started making plans.

2009 – The Production Garden

In the spring of 2009, as soon as the weather permitted, I dug up a new garden spot – almost 800 square feet to work with – still with a shovel. I surrounded it with rabbit guard, and set objectives:

1. To produce more food than I had the year before; ideally so much that I was forced to freeze, can or dehydrate food to preserve it.

2. To not make the same mistakes I made the year before – namely overcrowding and weeds.

I planned to grow only things that I felt I had a reasonable assurance would do well, based on my past garden experiences, and the research that I had done over the winter. My plan was for beets, turnips, Daikon radish, banana fingerling potatoes, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and yellow squash, green beans, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant.

Because over-planting (along with failure to thin) had been a big problem for me the year before, I wanted to make sure that all of my plants had enough space. So I decided to plant in a grid pattern, dividing my space into 3-foot-by-3-foot squares, with the goal of having one strong, healthy and heavily-producing plant on a mound in the center of each square; the exception being a few things like the Daikon, turnip and beets, which I knew could be a little closer together, and which ended up being anywhere from 6 to 12 plants per mound.

I had done some reading in the winter about companion planting, and decided to plant marigolds throughout the garden to attract beneficial insects.

I didn’t plant anything until about mid-April, which seems really late to me now. The first thing to go in were about a dozen Marigolds, followed by the beet, turnip and Daikon seeds, and the seed potatoes. A few days later – on an enthusiastic whim – I started some seeds inside. This was a low-tech affair, using the lights from the AeroGarden that I had gotten for Christmas that year. I learned that seeds will actually sprout if you plant them. I learned how they look rising up out of the soil. I learned the difference between first leaves and true leaves. I learned why sprouts get “leggy” and what that looks like.

I also learned to believe in miracles when a seedling pot that I tossed out the back door as a failure was found weeks later with a strong, sturdy zucchini seedling in it.

In a fit of impatience and anxiety I dug one of my seed potatoes back up to see if it was sprouting and what that looked like; then, reassured, I buried it again. I found a place to buy straw and took my first foray into mulching. I learned that eggplants and sweet potatoes bloom. Who knew? I learned to recognize a few common garden pests. By the time I hit mid-June in 2009, the point at which I’d been hastily planting the year before, a productive garden was well on its way.

And produce it did.

I bought and learned how to use a hot water bath canner. I made BBQ sauce, spaghetti sauce, stewed tomatoes, salsa, pickles and relish. By late August I was exhausted. Summer was largely over. I had lost my tomato plants prematurely due to drought. There were still sweet potatoes in the ground, and we were still harvesting peppers. I pulled up the yellow squash plants. The bush beans were spent, the nasturtium was gone, and even a few of the marigolds seemed to be heaving their last breath; victims, I suspect, of a combination of weeds, sweet potato vines, and a few very heavy late summer rains pounding the heck out of them. I was already starting to tend a fall garden – a brand new 800 square feet that we did this time with a tiller, and I’d mixed manure compost and humus into the soil where the root veggies would go.

2009 was characterized not only by the encouragement of success, but also by anxiety over empty ground, by a longing for the lushness of green, by self doubt and insecurity over the newness of it all and the hugeness of the project that I had set for myself.

But it turned out okay. And I begin the 2010 garden with a little more confidence than I had the year before; with a little more faith in the unfamiliar and in what I cannot see.

2010 – An Imperfect Peace

This year is my first experience of a garden having grown first in my mind.

This is partly a function of experience. In 2008 I did not know how a cantaloupe came to be on the vine. I did not know that my little okra seedling would grow like a weed until it towered over me on a stalk so thick and tough that I almost never got it out of there in the fall. In 2008 I had still never witnessed the elegant and sturdy beauty with which a cucurbit unfolds itself from its seed and rises towards the light. I had not yet slaughtered hundreds of beautiful insects because when it came to some particular pieces of food – well – it was them or me.

This year I have a good idea of what to expect; of how much space things will take up; of how much of a challenge any particular crop might be, and I kind of understand the character of those challenges. And among other challenges that I am prepared to meet this year, is that of gardening with a small and eager, stubborn and independent child.

In his essay, “The Garden Tour,” Michael Pollan tells us that “in a path is the beginning of a narrative, that sure and welcoming sign of human presence,” and I guess I probably shared the opening lines of our garden path story with you this past fall. With a small child in the garden, paths are a necessity. You just cannot be too clear about where a little one ought to be stepping and where she should not, and while her imagination is burgeoning and supple, what my daughter imagines is there in front of her in this very moment, and she reacts accordingly. There is little room in her reality – indeed there is little reality for her – in what else might come to be in the place where she sets her foot. For her the garden is now, while for me the garden is what I have learned from the past two years. It is both now, and later – March and June and September – it is already and simultaneously latency, growth and harvest.

But this year’s garden is also raising the stakes in a slightly metaphysical direction. Because this year, in addition to providing us with food, I also envision our garden as a place to be; a place where we will spend time not only on working to maintain it, on coaxing and on harvest, but on appreciation of it; a place to be reminded of all for which we are thankful; a place to meditate; a place for spiritual resuscitation; a place to go to be restored.

And so the paths that I am laying down this year are not only for my daughter.

I’ve used materials that we already had here on the property, and I’ve also hauled in square red stepping stones that my daughter chose herself. The paths are crooked. They buck and dip. But they are solid and they are obvious, and I can’t help but think that as things begin to grow and fill in, as we fill in spaces between the fruits and vegetables with masses of flowers – as I erect the arched trellis that I can’t seem to get out of my mind over one of those paths – that these bare and crooked stones will be transformed beyond utility into lovely surprises. I can’t help but think that what at the moment seems bare and ugly will at some point this summer strike me as beautiful, and that it will take on a life of its own.

The paths are also a gesture of permanency. We will have a garden. Not only this year but next year, and the next and the year after that. We will use the same spaces. This time next year we will not be digging and transforming; this time next year our garden will already have bones. This year we are less anxious; our intentions are less immediate. We are planting strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, most of whose fruits we may not see this year at all. And we are painstakingly putting in paths which were not in the garden that I designed on paper this winter.

That garden – still under the influence of production – was designed for yield and for storage. But as I laid down my first stone a few weeks ago I realized that maps and plans have given way to whimsy. Production has given way to a sense of plenty and an ability to find peace in the garden’s imperfection. And potential has already, this early in the spring, given way to actual joy.