Everything I Need Is Here

A trip down memory lane reminds me that I'm not "staying put," I'm growing in place.

Last week, I attended a gathering of food system actors and activists—from farmers, to chefs, to non-profit leaders, and activists. I’m no longer an active part of that world, which is full of our state’s finest forward-thinkers and innovators, but I’m lucky to be friends with folks who are (hello, Liz Broussard and Noel Didla). The gathering was held in a building that once upon a time was a grocery store. When I first moved here, that building housed a non-profit that hosted community exercise classes and a farmers market, and whose general mission was to improve health outcomes for the surrounding community. It was also headquarters for the service organization that brought me to Mississippi.

Walking into that space felt like walking into the past, when Mississippi was new to me, when I was a starry-eyed volunteer whose mission was to teach kids about healthy foods. Everything around me then had seemed ripe for change, and I felt poised to be a change agent. I had no idea then that the biggest change would take place inside myself. Outside, the night air was cool, but I remembered the way the summer humidity felt on my skin in August 2013 when I arrived—sticky and inescapable, like the shock of my new reality.

I thought back to my first house here, a rental in Fondren that I shared with two other volunteers who were also new to Jackson and the South. The rental was a real 1930s Sears house, the kind you used to be able to order from a kit and build yourself, which makes it sound more architecturally interesting than it really was. The house had peeling green paint and a giant magnolia out front with thick, low hanging branches that the neighborhood kids loved to climb. Inside, you had to walk through bedrooms to get to either of the two bathrooms, and there was a staircase in the back of the kitchen that went up to an unquestionably haunted attic. 

I remembered, too, flipping on the kitchen light and watching with horror as fat brown roaches scuttled into the shadows. My landlord laughed when I called and told him about “the roach problem,” suggesting I use the bugs for fishing bait. I was writing that line down in my head as he said it, saving it for later. Even the roaches had potential in a future story I planned to tell. 

In those days, I went to work in a purple t-shirt emblazoned with a bright orange carrot. I built raised beds with pallet wood, smothered grass with cardboard and bags of pine straw that I scavenged from the neighbors with pine trees. I planted pumpkin seeds in September. They sprouted, then grew vines and tendrils, then froze to mush in early November. I had no idea what I was doing, but I was having fun. I made beet and blueberry smoothies with students for Valentine’s day. Showed them how to plant kale and collards seeds and chew mint and stevia leaves together for the garden version of a peppermint patty. My second year, there was a giant cicada brood, and I brought the fourth graders out to observe the slick cicada nymphs emerging from their papery husks into winged adults.

The school gardens I built and tended no longer exist. The private school for children with speech and language impairments has relocated from west Jackson to a wealthy suburb. The public school razed its garden the year after my service term ended. Within months of my departure, all that was left of the raised beds were rectangular scars in the earth, disappearing back into the creeping arms of St. Augustine grass. Gone too was the garden pergola that I built with the help of a team of volunteers on MLK Jr. Day of Service. It didn’t even last a full year. Without a full-time volunteer, there wasn’t enough time, money, or energy to keep the fire ants and weeds at bay, to keep the pergola from becoming a liability to the school. The erasure of those garden beds taught me a lot of lessons, not least of which was humility. 

At some point in the last decade, after the newness of Mississippi wore off, as new and old friends left the state for opportunities elsewhere, I began to feel restless, anxious that I wasn’t also moving on and up. My generation has been conditioned to stay in motion, to jump states for school or a better paying job or a change of scenery. When I moved to Mississippi, I assumed that it would be the first of many such moves. Yet here I still was, and am. Over the years I’ve wondered if staying put was a sign of personal failure. But the longer I’ve stayed, the harder it has been to imagine uprooting myself and my family, starting over in unfamiliar soil. That’s because time is the most precious resource we have, and time is what I’ve invested into this city, this state. It’s non-transferable.

In gathering with friends and farmers and real-life change agents, eating fried chicken and vegetable gumbo, cabbage, beans, and honey bun cake prepared by some of Mississippi’s finest chefs, I realized that I have not so much stayed put as grown in place. 

Too often we confuse stillness for stagnation, physical movement for forward momentum. Reading and publishing Mississippi stories in Rooted each week also reminds me of the power of growing in place. In the past year of working on this magazine, I have found myself less anxious about where or whether I’ll move, and more interested in how I am growing and who is growing with me. As A. H. Jerriod Avant writes in his interview: “Everything I need I have and is here: family, a house, land, a job, and a community.“

While you’re here, catch up on our January contributor issues—