lines they needed to protect the grounds. We ran tests to determine whether the
soil had enough nutrients and didn’t contain any toxic elements like lead or
mercury.
And then we were good to go.
Several days after I returned from Europe, I hosted a group of students from
Bancroft Elementary School, a bilingual school in the northwestern part of the
city. Weeks earlier, we’d used shovels and hoes to prepare the soil. Now the same
kids were back to help me do the planting. Our patch of dirt sat not far from the
southern fence along E Street, where tourists often congregated to gaze up at the
White House. I was glad that this would now be a part of their view.
Or at least I hoped to be glad at some point. Because with a garden you
never know for sure what will or won’t happen—whether anything, in fact, will
grow. We’d invited the media to cover the planting. We’d invited all the White
House chefs to help us, along with Tom Vilsack, Barack’s secretary of agriculture.
We’d asked everyone to watch what we were doing. Now we had to wait for the
results. “Honestly,” I’d said to Sam before anyone arrived that morning, “this
better work.”
That day, I knelt with a bunch of fifth graders as we carefully put seedlings
into the ground, patting the dirt into place around the fragile stalks. After being in
Europe and having my every outfit dissected in the press (I’d worn a cardigan
sweater to meet the Queen, which was almost as scandalous as touching her had
been), I was relieved to be kneeling in the dirt in a light jacket and a pair of
casual pants. The kids asked me questions, some about vegetables and the tasks at
hand, but also things like “Where’s the president?” and “How come he’s not
helping?” It took only a little while, though, before most of them seemed to lose
track of me, their focus centered instead on the fit of their garden gloves and the
worms in the soil. I loved being with children. It was, and would be throughout
the entirety of my time in the White House, a balm for my spirit, a way to
momentarily escape my First Lady worries, my self-consciousness about
constantly being judged. Kids made me feel like myself again. To them, I wasn’t a
spectacle. I was just a nice, kinda-tall lady.
As the morning went on, we planted lettuce and spinach, fennel and
broccoli. We put in carrots and collard greens and onions and shell peas. We
planted berry bushes and a lot of herbs. What would come from it? I didn’t
know, the same way I didn’t know what lay ahead for us in the White House,
nor what lay ahead for the country or for any of these sweet children surrounding