This past week, I started harvesting my blue corn. I got the call that the raccoons were starting to feast, so I came down from my solo pine nut perch overlooking the ancient Uncompahgre, to the valley where I drove through dry adobes back into the lush little valley I have plopped myself for the meantime, where my corn patch made home all summer, though I have been continuously without a home that welcomes me since June.
I made a couple small pit stops along the route to them, but I went straight there, to the patch, where the stalks grow three feet over my head, and many have fallen over. The corn leaves in the wind move differently as they have been drying, I walk through the isles, scoping out the scene. Raccoons took some of the best almost ready cobbs, and ate them in the same spot on the ground in the center of the garden in their little party, dispersing their poop along the desiccated corn plants they bent over. The destruction wasn’t as bad as the landowner made it out to seem, so I was grateful that I managed to snag over 100 cobs in two harvests, with many more to come. This is more than I have gotten for myself in any year I have grown this particular corn. I managed to grow more this year than I did as a collective in the past. As raccoons remind us, patience and faith. Much of the corn needs another week or so at least, so what to do when the thousands of years of genetics could be a snack overnight in an instant?
I find myself, in a place where I spend more of my time alone. And yet, I don’t have a place of my own. I planted this corn alone. The land owners helped by watering the corn this summer when I wasn’t around. I harvest alone, mostly shuck alone, sometimes taking my buckets to places where interested people could be, to see if anyone wants to reveal the secrets of the universe with me in the colors and awe of these corns, but for the most part I haven’t found people who care at all in those moments, not caring to shuck with me these days. My ex-partner has done a little as they have an interesting connection to corn. A few children did a couple. Mostly, I shucked alone.
I didn’t grow all of this corn for just myself, I did it for a community I don’t have. I did it for the mourning of the community I used to have who grew corn together and shared in the processing and the eating of this corn together. How did I get to a place in my life where I tend these seeds alone, the wild and the cultivated, and put up food for more than just me and often don’t get to share it with anyone else?
I operate from a place of collective, of wanting for grow for others and for me, to gather medicine and food for all. I want togetherness around land skills and food, and yet, at 37, I run into a lot of folk not caring, not having time, not understanding, not prioritizing. I live in a place of not being able to go back to where I once tended this corn in Appalachia, because nothing is the same, I am not the same, and yet, the grief of loss is too much, finding myself camping alone in a Pinon grove where the farm I used to tend for years in collective responsibility drowns outside of Asheville, and don’t know if many people I know are dead.
I find myself, alone, high and dry, and yet my car won’t start, and my old community, drowning together and also supporting one another, I weirdly I wish I was there in the toxic mud and disaster, mutual aid, old time music jams and tears. I grow the corn that that place gave me, while they lose their whole crop and so much more. So I grow it for the collective, for the passing on of the seed, of the intelligence of these kernels in every year, tear, fuck and flood that passed its being. Perhaps I’ll send a box of the abundance for hopes that the family I once had on land in place where we harvested for one another, gets to enjoy the lime soaked hominy and tortillas, while I settle into the depths of the loneliness of not having this collective reality anymore. I’m reminded that I’m still planting and growing for not just myself, always.
The last I grew this corn, I planted it with a love, a human that I felt devoted connection to, in a place in Appalachia that was supposed to be temporary pitstop during covid tending soil and recouping for a moment, with the idea of sharing it too with others at the next place on the horizon, but then I was left alone camped in the garden in another hurricane, smaller and less disastrous where I decomposed into broken pieces, and starvation and bad thoughts that got used against me. The only thing that kept me alive was the corn, which I watched from my grief window, keeping watch, as wind bursts blew down stalks, I went out barefoot and mud to tie them up again, praying over the cobs I thought would heal everything, planted in placenta and dead mice graves.
I kept watch, stayed to harvest the corn despite the loss I felt, despite the purposeless of why I even cared anymore to see a garden through I planted with someone I loved who left me for reasons I didn’t understand, and still never will. I stayed for the corn. I let everything else go. I gave all the food away and stopped eating. The sweet potatoes rotted. The tomatoes and calendula I gave to a neighbor. I could not eat the food I planted with someone I loved who left, who I had intended to share it with, and share together with others. I kept some winter squash. I saved seed. I gave the seed to others. They planted and this summer I saw their last one, that lasted two years in storage perfectly.
I held onto this corn that was birthed from the depths of Appalachia, but from Mexico before that, with hopes that it could be eaten with the people I planted it with. It never happened, as many prayers are actually empty and bandaids of hope and unknown, so I had to pray over the corn in my tending this season, another realm of heartache and confusion, despite having never eaten one kernel from the last harvest. I saved for a ceremony that was never to be, and instead fed the patch I birthed this season as an art project in life and death.
Some folks offered me a plot of soil to plant in. They had tended the soil well, and it was full of nitrogen, which is nice for a place with such alkali rich lands from former oceans who existed here for thousands of years. I didn’t expect much but was consistently surprised. I haven’t had a chance to make beauty in abundance in awhile. It grew. It kept growing to over 10 feet tall. The grasshopper plague didn’t phase them. They kept going. I had them crowded. I thinned them. I cried tears in them, these kernels are alive? How did I keep these beings alive for so long? What stories do they hold? Are they happy here back in the arid lands they originated from or do they miss the place of the humid jungle where they had been tended for over 20 years?
Instead of waiting on a community ceremony that will never be, I tended the plot in relative solitude, with the backend support of strangers, who enjoyed they view of them, and offered their fertility for my unknown project.
I’m processing the shock and grief in response to the Kali-like destruction of Hurricane Helene in Appalachia. I lived there for many years living land based and in community. I am from a couple hours east from the heart of the worst of it, where my family has been 5 generations deep, but is slowing leaving including me not being there anymore. I’m in shock at the flooding, death, and pollution. Once I experienced a smaller flood in my gardens in Appalachia. I had a process I went through in the acceptance of this destruction, and what it means to have all wiped away, with fresh earth clean from the past. A new space, anew, ripe with grief and potential. I know this death will open new potential but it doesn’t come with utter heart wrenching loss first. I still have not founded my way after my biggest loss, and sometimes these things take the time they need and we cannot force them to hurry on. Nothing is ever the same, and cannot be. Going back to Barnardville, if I ever will, will never be the same. That old life is over. I knew it when I left last, chasing a dream and love in the west that didn’t actually want me. That has yet to reveal to me the rebirth.
I feel this trauma deeply. I feel incredibly sad for the pollution, the soil inundated by plastics and caustic toxic chemicals from modern homes and factories disintegrating into the sacred waters of these jungled lands. My heart aches for this land to be held as much as I long for it as an individual human being. My own place of where I grew up had toxic soil and water from the tobacco farms, the seatbelt factory, the coat factories dyes that got dumped into the creek. The DDT that got sprayed along the Roanoke River to make the lakes, and the hundreds of people that died from cancer and autoimmune diseases later on, from swimming fresh in those lakes.
The corn this season has some red kernels in the cobs, from a friend’s crop next door. Are we really ever truly alone? Even if we feel like we are? Do I keep them in the mix when saving seed or pull them out?
Praying with my love for Appalachia and her plants, people, music and water.
So beautifully moving Kelly. Your story always returns to the east. Love and community forever. Heartbreaking and heart making.
All we can each and all do, in the name of love, is let go let go let go…. Without shutting down. Global heartbreak global heart opening. The path is steep, winding, treacherous and exquisitely beautiful. And even the path is a human construct.
What a journey with no destination. 💜