336 animal, vegetable, miraclewatching the clock tick down the seconds till we could run out and buy
Moon Pies? No. I’m sorry, but the truth is so undramatic, I can’t even fi nd
“the day” in my journal.
The best I can do is recall a moment when I understood I had kept
some promise to myself, having to do with learning to see the world dif-
ferently. It was a day in early April when three little trees in our yard were
covered with bloom—dark pink peach blossoms, pale pink plum, and
white pear, filling the space like a Japanese watercolor. The air smelled
spicy; the brown pasture had turned brilliant green. From where I stood
on the front porch I could see my white- winged turkeys moving slowly
through that emerald sea, nibbling as they went. I pictured how it would
be in another month when the grass shot up knee- deep. I was struck,
then, with a vivid fantasy of my family being in the turkeys’ place, imagin-
ing what a thrill it would be to wander chest- deep in one’s dinner as an
ordinary routine. I mean to say I pictured us wading through piles of salad
greens, breast- stroking into things like tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella.
I snapped out of it, recognizing this was not a very normal daydream.
This was along the lines my astute children would diagnose as wackadoo.
I took myself to be a woman changed by experience.
But I’d noticed the kids had changed too. One day at the farmer’s mar-
ket a vendor had warned us there might be some earworms in the corn
because it was unsprayed. He pointed out a big one wriggling in the silks
of one of the ears in our bag, and reached in to pluck it off. Lily politely
held out her hand: that was our worm, we’d paid for it. She would take
that protein to her chickens, and in time it would be eggs. Camille used
similar logic to console me after my turkeys raided the garden and took
some of the nicest tomatoes. “Mom,” she said, “you’ll eat them eventu-
ally.” And I did.
It wasn’t just our family, either, that had changed in a year. Food was
now very much a subject of public conversation—not recipes, but issues.
When we’d fi rst dreamed up our project, we’d expected our hardest task
would be to explain in the most basic terms what we were doing, and why
on earth we’d bother. Now our local newspaper and national ones fre-
quently had local- food feature stories on the same day. Every state had it
going on, including Arizona, the food scene we feared we had left for