I saw a random video about a marketplace in Vietnam the other day and got briefly overwhelmed with fey visions of what my world could have been.
In the video, the marketplace had a section at the front where people could just rock up and sell produce from their gardens. I went, "Aw, that's nice," then got my mind blasted into a world where the little garden patch I've inherited that I've been struggling to cultivate could have been active and productive for decades. My grandfather transformed his entire backyard into a miniature farm, with grapevines and tomatoes and such a profundity of peppers that we're still working through dried pepper flakes years after he passed. His neighbor kept a dovecote where city pigeons could chill, safe and warm and fed, until dinner time. I did not learn these skills as I was, like, four, and mostly concerned with convincing someone to buy me a Kinder Surprise.
More personally, my mother was a hobby gardener until she, too, passed, and that little garden patch I inherited was her domain. I don't know what to do with it; I'm trying, but I have to learn through a combination of internet and trial-and-error. Last year, I learned that one of the random plants in the side garden is a peach tree, which I'm inordinately excited about; I always wanted a fruit tree, maybe several, with enough apples to press into cider and peaches to dry into snacks. Hell, last year was the first time I ate something I grew from seed. I feel the weight of history behind me, loud and complete, and it screams with a million voices that this is weird, that it's weird that it took so long.
And I wonder what could have happened if I had spent my childhood autumns helping haul tomatoes and zucchinis down to the market. I've always had a forager's temperament; I wonder what it would have tasted like, accentuating my mother's homemade raspberry jams with the blackberries, crabapples, and sumac that I found on my journeys. I hearken not to a denied past, but to another version of now, when instead of WikiHow articles and bullshit AI summaries, I could lean over fences and commiserate with other backyard growers about ground cover, pruning, light levels. I could be sharing identification and cooking tips for garlic mustard, kudzu, and Japanese knotweed, which you can and should be eating. I could be taking a measure of honey from the Guy Who's Not Afraid of Bees in return for a measure of the crabapple cider it'd be sweetening.
My boyfriend has a remarkable talent for growing fresh balcony herbs, so much so that he routinely produces far, far more than he could ever use. He lets his pots go fallow rather than risk the thoroughly stupid amount of basil and thyme going to waste. I imagine him with a little pot of dried dill in his kitchen and a massive bale of the stuff to trade in his condo's front hall. I have a pair of friends with a talent for growing full-ass balcony gardens out of kitchen scraps. I imagine them hauling spinach and onions grown from half a chunk of last spring's dinner and earning ten times what they paid.
I imagine knowing what to do with this dirt that I'm responsible for.
There should be a word for it - something long and German and complete, or soft and Portuguese and poetically appropriate - for this sense of absent knowledge. There is an understanding of the world that I'm missing. There is a patch of grass I played on as a kid that could have been part of a very different now.
We could have done it all together.
