Last week I dug up the potatoes from the square meter vegetable garden next to the house. Last year, during a camping trip, we stole them from a farmer on the border between France and Belgium. Come, I suggested, let’s get some potatoes for dinner! He was a little reluctant. Nervous about getting caught by the farmer. His moral compass surprised me only because he had recently told me he had no qualms about pocketing an extra ginger root or two from the supermarket. The difference between corporate and personal agricultural theft, he explained. He went to the edge of the field, looking over both shoulders twice, and quickly dug out 5 tiny potatoes, leaving the plant intact. I laughed at his willingness to impress me in this moment, and confessed I would probably be too scared to dig them out myself. I have always believed it to be a good sign when lovers inspire innocent small crimes in each other’s company.
We never cooked the potatoes. They traveled back home in a bag. They were kept in a bowl in my cupboard for next time, to make little chips, maybe? But time kept passing by and the tiny taters turned wrinkly and sad and started sprouting. The bowl, placed on top of some jars in a totally inconvenient manner, kept falling out of the cupboard every time I opened it for months. The sprouts grew and grew, the potatoes turned dusty in the little bowl. Any sane person would have tossed them out. But I am sentimental beyond reason, and could not get rid of the earthy mess – or the memory. Winter came and went. Spring announced itself, as did the annual urge to plant every potentially growing thing in the garden.
What would happen if I just put these dusty sprouts in the vegetable plot outside?
Within a week of being placed in the ground, the plants grew exponentially. There’s something almost a little unnerving about the amount of life-force that’s stored in a sprouted seed awaiting the right circumstances.
Spring came. As did his reluctant and unwanted departure. It rained. Outside and inside. A lot. The plants were attacked by an unrelenting arsenal of hungry midnight snails. They were shat on by a dozen birds covering the left-over stems in pink berry seeded poop. The neighbourhood cats turned the surrounding area into their personal excrement graveyard. It was looking rough. Weathered. Not unlike my aching heart. I figured, since there were barely any leaves left for any real photosynthesis to occur, I would just see what had happened under the soil and remove the withering plants from the plot.
*
*
I take a bowl outside and begin to dig.
*
*
*
There, underground, a whole network of white stolons connects the 5 plants to an abundance of beautifully healthy potatoes. I collect them in the bowl and take them inside. Wash them. Dry them off carefully. I sit on the floor in front of 30 fresh looking newborn baby potatoes. I hold them in my hands and cry.
My best friend calls. She asks how I am doing. I say, eeehm, to be completely honest, I am laying in bed crying with a potato in my hand. My brother calls to ask me how I’m doing. I cry some more.
I send a picture of the harvest to the potato thief on the run. A symbol of what grows in the darkness. Underground. For what love does when we care for it. Beyond reason. Unseen. When we are patient. When we collaborate. When we create the right circumstances for life forcing itself into existence, unnervingly.
I decide to keep six of them in the cupboard, in another inconveniently placed bowl, to sprout again for next year. This magic trick needs to multiply. I wonder if it’s possible to get witchy with these spuds. A ritual. To perform some spells in starch. Anything. I eat 4 small ones for dinner. Butter and salt. A prayer. Pure flavor and presence. They are delicious in a ridiculous way. I chew on them slowly and cry. Thinking of the stories he told me about his father growing potatoes. The harvest after he died. Imagining him looking from beyond. Then thinking about the necklace I once made for my ex-husband that he used to wear religiously some 15 years ago. Like a token of my love. It was a golden nugget of clay on a piece of simple string. I called it the little Buddha, but his colleagues would repeatedly ask him why he was wearing that weird potato around his neck. We would always laugh. What’s the difference between Buddha and a potato anyway? He hasn’t really acknowledged my existence in 8 years. It’s gone totally underground. In the rhizomes of dreams and memory. His son, now 20 and an ocean apart, sends me an image of my avatar playing guitar in a videogame we used to play together that was recently re-released. Had to show you a picture of you in Tomodachi Life, he writes. I laugh, delighted to be with him in the digital dimension. And I cry. Missing him in big ways, perpetually. He shows up in my dream. I text to tell him about the astral visit. He responds: hell yeah. I think we are all connected somehow, in some way. I tell him I believe that too. Hoping he can always access the rhizome of my love for his entire being.
I keep the image of the unearthed potato plant in my mind’s eye, white stems feeding a whole family of bulbous starch tubers under the black soil. Drinking rain and feeding off of leaves in the sun. That’s all of us, you know? Connected like that somehow.
Metaphysical Mulch 