We moved into the first floor apartment on Palmetto Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the spring of 1980, the same year Reagan was elected. Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight brought a new music genre to the national stage, and a fierce heatwave hit NY, making August the hottest on record. I remember watching my mother standing by the window in the morning, surveying the backyard, coffee in hand, the steam fogging the glass. Piles of trash littered the yard, and the makeshift barriers that separated ours from the surrounding yards, were made of plywood clumsily nailed together and falling apart, so there were gaping holes in spots.
Days later, mom climbed out the window and went to work. She swept up the years of garbage, bags that smelled of something dead or dying, cracked flower pots, a fork with twisted tongs; and threw it all over the dilapidated fence into the junk yard next door. This wasn’t her littering. That yard was piled high with trash already. It was one of the many rubble strewn lots that dotted our neighborhood .
As mom toiled, I tiptoed past her and stood at the foot of the tree (I’d learn later that summer that it was a plum tree). A past resident had painted the trunk a dull salmon color. I picked at the chipping paint, pulling some trunk with it. I patted the tree and whispered, “Hi. I’m Vanessa.” I was a tiny four-year-old though I once overheard my mom tell someone: “Vanessa was always big. Even when she was little, she was big.”
I started grappling up the trunk, scraping my legs and hands, peeling the pleather off my sneakers. At one point, a sharp branch stabbed into my side. I winced but kept climbing. Mom would scream at me to get down, “Te vas a dar un mal golpe, machua!” I wasn’t bothered by being called a tomboy. I saw nothing wrong with doing things girls weren’t “supposed to” do. Who made those rules anyway? Mom cut her eyes at me while I kept climbing. It took me weeks, but I didn’t give up, and neither did mom.
My mother wasn’t a Martha Stewart type of gardener with a sun hat and apron. She worked in a sofrito stained nightgown or t-shirt and shorts. She took to tilling the soil, using her right leg to push the old shovel into the ground to bring up the dark soil with squirming earthworms. When the earth wouldn’t give, she got on all fours and used her hands. Then she went out and bought the seeds. Each packet had a picture of the potential inside: peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, herbs like peppermint, cilantro and rosemary, flowers like geraniums and sunflowers. She handled the seeds with a tenderness I envied.
By mid-summer, we had a lush garden, and I’d learned how to climb the plum tree. The sunflowers grew so tall and heavy, mom tied them to the fence using an old shoelace. We ate from the bounty of that yard every day—sofrito made with peppers, cilantro and recao, diced tomato and cucumber salad. It was from my perch on a branch that I watched my mom’s joy when she first saw evidence of baby tomatoes and eggplants.
I was in my forties and a mother myself when mom revealed how she learned to garden. Up until then, her stories of her childhood in Honduras were of hunger and suffering. We were poor, but I didn’t know the hunger mom spoke of.
Her face grew wistful and nostalgic, the way it does when she speaks of her great-grandmother Tinita, who mom says “fue mi madre.” They lived in the campo outside of the city of La Ceiba, where Tinita taught my mother to toil the earth, planting vegetables, flowers and herbs. They grew enough to eat and sell, and lived comfortably, though not lavish. Mom laughed when she spoke of the stubborn mule they owned. Whenever the mule was tired, it sat and refused to move no matter how Tinita slapped his rear. Once, he sat in the middle of the river as they were crossing. Tinita had to unload the goods he was carrying, and they sat at the river’s edge for hours until the donkey decided to move again. Mom’s eyes welled and she blinked hard a few times. “Ahi siempre tuvimos de comer.” In the city the land was scarce, so they couldn’t plant enough to feed themselves. “Ahí sufrimos,” mom said. When I asked why they moved to the city, mom shrugged. That’s where the work was.
The next summer, I started climbing into the junkyard next door when mom wasn’t looking. Piled high with old tires, license plates with sharp, curled edges, lumber with rusted nails jutting out, an occasional needle, cables, wires, rats, feral cats, rubble. Shrubs and trees pushed up through all that trash, and at the height of the summer, the foliage grew so thick that if you looked at the right angle, you could almost forget where you were. It was a jungle to my five, six, seven-year-old eyes. The mounds were ancient structures built into the ground.
Somehow the dark magic within had been unleashed, and I was called there, the female Indiana Jones, to save the world from its wrath.
It was in that garden and that junkyard that I became fascinated with the earth’s fauna and flora; all things green and squirmy.
* * *
Photo used with permission by photographer Meryl Meisler
My mother was still gardening when I left at 13 to attend boarding school hundreds of miles away. She stopped when she grew tired of the neighbors littering her garden with their trash. She brought her plants into her tiny, railroad style apartment where they now crowd every room.
I don’t have pictures of my mother’s garden, but I have images of the neighborhood that surrounded it. I remember seeing the news of Beirut after the bombings in the early 80s and thinking it looked like home.
Between 1965 and 1980, there were over a million fires in NYC. Referred to as the Fire Wars, the South Bronx is most notorious for the aftermath, but Bushwick was just as devastated. Occurring during the city’s worst fiscal crisis, when fire houses were being shuttered and the culmination of redlining, mortgage scams and insurance fraud left black and brown neighborhoods in shambles. Then the blackout happened in July of 1977.
Neil deMause writes of the Brooklyn Wars: “It instantly became part of the legend of 1970s New York: the night that the final indignity was visited upon the dead-broke, arson-wracked city. And no part of the five boroughs was to become more associated with the blackout than the old north Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick. When the lights went out, hundreds of people began breaking into stores along Broadway, the southern boundary separating Bushwick from Bedford-Stuyvesant, pulling down security gates, smashing windows, hauling off furniture, TVs, whatever they could carry. On the commercial strip beneath the elevated J train tracks, 45 stores were set ablaze; a few days later, what became known as the “All Hands Fire” started in an abandoned factory, taking out 23 more buildings in the heart of the neighborhood.”1
Bushwick was left a neighborhood dotted with abandoned and burnt out buildings, and trash and rubble strewn lots.
My mother built a garden oasis in that war zone. I’ve carried it with me since.
Photo used with permission by photographer Meryl Meisler
* * *
When I became a mother, I shared my love and respect for nature with my daughter, taking her to parks around the city and hiking their trails. Not Central Park so much because it’s planted, and Seneca Village, home to the largest number of African-American property owners in NY before the Civil War, was razed to create it. We’d take hours-long train rides to the beaches, Rockaway, Brighton, Coney Island. This was how I introduced her to the idea of a creator/higher power when she was in Pre-K; if I believe in anything, I believe in nature. “God is in everything, mamita. In the trees, the clouds, the birds. God is in you.” She started interrogating this on our commutes to school. She’d point at a flower, a lamp post, a traffic light and ask: “Is God in that flower? Is God in that lamp? Is God in that light?” Once, a man walked by with his dog. When the dog stopped to do its business, my daughter giggled and looked up at me, her supernova smile taking over her entire face. “Mommy, is God in poop?” I laughed too. “Sure, God is in poop, too.”
* * *
Wherever I’ve traveled or moved to, I’ve searched out woods. The redwood forests of Berkeley and Oakland. A tree lined trail in Decatur, Georgia. The deep woods of Portland, Oregon.
At home in NYC, it was the old-growth forest of Inwood Hill Park that saved me when my brother Juan Carlos died in 2013. I walked paths created centuries ago by the Lenape, some so steep you have to grapple up. I discovered their ancient healing circles that are now being maintained by Tainos.
I went into the forest one day, a mantra in my head: “I need you to hold me. I need you to hold me.”
My face was streaked with tears, snot dripped out of my nose.
It started in front of me, blue jays chirping so loud, I stopped. Sparrows to my right. Red cardinals to my left. Titmice and nuthatches behind me. The birds carried my broken heart into their throats.
I was being held in bird song.
* * *
Once, when mom had been gardening in that yard for years, she sent me out to gather tomatoes and peppers. “I need them for the sofrito,” she said. Small piles of onions and garlic lay on the cutting board on top of the table. The day before I’d noticed that the tomatoes were red and green. I turned them over like I’d seen her do. They were firm to the touch.
I gasped at the scene that greeted me. The rats from the junkyard next door had feasted on mom’s vegetables. Peppers, tomatoes and eggplant lay scattered about, bitten into in chunks. I could make out their teeth marks on the flesh. A few hung limply on the bush. The rats had even bitten the flower heads off their stems. I gathered what I could and climbed back into the apartment.
“Mommy,” I said in almost a whisper. “The rats ate them. These are the only ones left.”
Mom slammed down the knife she was using to chop the cilantro and stomped out to the yard. She cursed and yanked up some of the bushes. I ran to hide in the room I shared with my sister and brother, and didn’t come out until she called us for dinner.
Mom eventually brought her plants inside. “Here I can protect them.” That backyard is back to the condition it was when we first moved in.
She still has plants all over her small, railroad style apartment, the same one she raised us in in Bushwick, perched at the top of cabinets and bookshelves, on window gates, hanging from hooks in the ceiling, on the table in her living room, a table that is made for four but can only seat one due to all those plants.
Her light bill is always astronomically high, nearly $300 a month, because of the lights she keeps on 24/7 for her plants. “They’re my babies now,” she says.
* * *
It was the deck overlooking the park that sold the Bronx apartment to me in late 2016 when my now-wife and I moved in together. For years, I dreamed of living somewhere that looked out onto a forest. I’d imagined plants hanging on windows, and a backyard garden like the one my mother had. I hadn’t inherited my mother’s green thumb, so I didn’t know how I’d care for all that greenery. The only plant I hadn’t killed was a Golden Pothos, also known as Devil’s Ivy because it’s nearly indestructible. I named her “La Doña,” and gave friends cuttings when they visited.
When you fantasize of another life, you can dream up anything, until you get the chance and you do. Over the years, I expanded my vision and my construction worker wife helped bring it to reality. She hung lights, put up hooks, installed shelves and planters.
When the pandemic hit, I set my eyes to the deck. If we couldn’t go anywhere, I would create a space where we could relax and remember hope, despite the multiple ongoing horrors happening in the world—COVID-19, unarmed black and brown folks being murdered by police, the injustices happening at the border, climate change ravaging the earth as evidenced by extreme weather, like Hurricane Harvey, heat waves that killed people and livestock, droughts that caused famine, flooding that swept people’s homes and lives away.
I recruited my family and we started germinating seeds, and I started buying plants and flowers from the many vendors that sprouted up around the hood.
At first the nonstop blare of ambulance and police sirens was startling, but they eventually became white noise, like the ubiquitous fire truck sirens of my childhood.
We joined the many New Yorkers who at 7pm, headed to their windows and balconies to applaud the frontline workers fighting the pandemic. There was something at once heartbreaking and hopeful about the chorus of clapping, cheering, pots and drums beating, cowbells clanking, a saxophone a few times, played to the tune of Sinatra’s “New York, New York.”
It didn’t take long for me to see that I did on my deck what my mother did in our backyard in the 80s: I created a garden oasis in a warzone.
* * *
By mid-summer my deck garden was so lush, there was barely room for anyone but my plant babies.
This is what joy looks like.
Throughout the six years my wife and I have been together, we’ve escaped numerous times to the woods of upstate NY, NJ and PA. We met in the woods of Hart, Michigan, so our love for nature was something we bonded over immediately.
We talked about the dream we shared of living in the country, but it seemed like an impossible dream— I was a single mom and a struggling artist; she’d never met someone she wanted to do that with. It was on that deck that we started envisioning a garden on a land that was ours.
In August of 2020, we rented a house in Phoenicia, NY, to get away and celebrate my daughter’s 16th birthday. A stream ran through the back of the house, there were hiking trails steps away, and we couldn’t see or hear the neighbors, something unheard of by apartment dwellers like us. It was a blissful five days. When we returned, we were ready.
When we came to see the house in Orange County in upstate NY in October of 2020, we walked the 6.5 acres of land for 45 minutes before even stepping into the house. A fenced-in area had once been a garden. There were gaping holes in the fencing, and it was laden with fallen branches and a huge mound of ash and charcoal from the wood burning stove, but I saw the potential immediately. I thought of my mother’s garden. When we went into the house, I knew the room that looked out onto the garden would be my writing room. Suddenly we understood what our realtor, a sassy Dominicana, meant when she said: “You’ll know your house when you see it.”
* * *
Photos used with permission by photographer Katia Ruiz.
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We moved in in February, after delaying the move twice due to blizzard conditions. It snowed 28 inches, and then inches more over a matter of days. Neighbors who lived in the area for over forty years said they’d never experienced a winter like this.
I decided quickly that I was going to follow indigenous agricultural practices which hold that you can’t, shouldn’t plant on land you’re new to for an entire growing season. I was there to be a steward. To let the land teach me. To learn from its gifts.
The lessons and signs were (still are) everywhere.When my brother died in 2013, I bought my mom and I bleeding heart tinctures. They help with grief.
Bleeding hearts were one of the first flowers to bloom on our land.
I discovered peony bushes on the side of the house and along the circular driveway. Peonies were my bridal flower.
We have several hydrangea and hibiscus bushes on the land. These were my great grandmother Tinita’s favorite flowers.
I’ve dreamed of sharing this land with my daughter and her children, if she has any, and the family she builds. This spring, I spent days clearing out the 25 x 30 foot garden while my wife repaired the holes in the fencing and added vinyl panels. There’s an old, sacred energy about the space. I can feel the care that was put in the details, like the stones that line the perimeter to keep out burrowing animals like rabbits; a hydrangea bush marks due north and the entrance to the garden is due south.
As I tilled the land, I imagined sending my daughter out to get me ingredients for sofrito—onions, scallions, ajicitos, garlic, cilantro, recao, a bit of celery if my taste buds ask for it.
I imagine her cutting a fat tomato, like my sister did when we were kids, sprinkling some salt on it and taking a big bite, the juice dripping down her chin. Her eyes closed in utter delight and ecstasy.
I imagine sharing this bounty with my family. Making boxes of vegetation for my mom, titi, and grandma, and my sister-friends and chosen family as well. A CSA of sorts.
I dream this while worrying that extreme weather fueled by climate change will make this dream impossible.
* * *
Photo used with permission by photographer Katia Ruiz.
I lived in NYC in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit. The storm created a record 32-foot tall wave in NY Harbor, and was the strongest storm to make landfall in the Northeast.
In an article titled “The only storm that scared me,” meteorologist John Davitt wrote: “The storm was straight out of worst-case storm scenarios that researchers modeled over the past 20 years when doing studies on possible hurricane impacts for New York City.”2
Over the course of 48 hours, wind, rain, and water destroyed more than 300 homes and left hundreds of thousands without power.
Millions of gallons of seawater flooded the subways. A crane was ripped off a building by the winds. The storm left many New Yorkers vulnerable with limited access to food, drinking water, healthcare and other critical services. Numerous hospitals were closed and evacuated. I remember the aftermath: the fallen trees in Inwood Hill Park, how impossible it was to get gas for days on end.
My beloved city that never sleeps was paralyzed. There’s evidence3 that climate change very likely made Sandy’s impacts worse than they otherwise would have been.
I thought of Hurricane Sandy when Ida hit in August of 2021. The rain pelting the roof and windows sounded like small fists, pummeling. I watched from the deck doors.
The wind reminded me of the Fulton Street stop on the A/C line, specifically the sound the train makes when it’s resurfacing from the tunnel under the East River that leads to Brooklyn. You hear it before you see the lights of the train—a low roar that builds to a whooshing and rumbling when the wind rushes in, blowing your hair everywhere and pushing your body a few inches.
The trees bent and swayed at impossible angles. The rain fell in sheets. I wondered when it would stop or at least slow down. It didn’t. For hours.
The storm killed at least 49 people across the tri-state area, sparked massive flooding, and left hundreds of thousands of people without power.
My family and I were lucky. We never lost power though it flickered a few times. There was some flooding on the ground floor and our roof leaked a bit, but all in all, we were fortunate. An acquaintance had three feet of water in her basement, and discovered that her insurance, like most homeowner’s insurance, didn’t cover the flood damage.
Tripti Bhattacharya, an assistant professor of earth and environmental sciences at Syracuse University told NPR: “A storm like this would have been exceptionally rare 20 or 50 years ago. But we have to start thinking about it becoming the norm as the climate warms.”4
I’ve heard that severe weather like this will become more commonplace. NBC News reported just the other day: “A child born in 2021 will live on average through seven times as many heat waves, twice as many wildfires and nearly three times as many droughts, crop failures and river floods as their grandparents, according to a study released Sunday that looks at how different generations will be affected by climate change.”5
When it will be our turn? We live at the foot of a mountain, surrounded by swampland, bogs and ponds. Will this always be here or will climate change and severe weather take this dream from us? This dream that started in my mother’s garden in Bushwick.
People’s houses are being swept away by overflowing rivers, land and rock slides. Wildfires on the west coast have caused some gorgeous sunsets in these parts, but there’s nothing beautiful about the reasons why it’s happening.6
Will I get a chance to become indigenous to this land? Indigenous defined the way Potowatomi writer and scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer explains it in her opus Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants: “For all of us, becoming indigenous to a place means living as if your children’s future mattered, to take care of the land as if our lives, both material and spiritual depended on it.”
Insects are vanishing at alarming rates.7 Will my grandchildren never know what it’s like to feel a katydid latch onto their finger, like dozens of tiny, sticky graspers?
Will they never get to marvel and laugh at the noisy frog orgy that commences on the pond on the first day of spring?
Will they get to hear the screams and barks of the foxes during mating season?
Will they get that sense of awe when they hear the screech of a barn owl, the hoot of a great horned owl through the canopy?
I worked so hard for this life on this land.
I am doing my part. I’ve become aware of how much trash we produce and am working on changing that. I save the paper to burn in the wood burning stove. This city girl has started several composting piles on our land. I spent the winter saving and grounding the shells of eggs we’ve eaten, and stored them for use in our garden.
I can do so much, but the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses are corporations who, despite knowing the damage they’re doing to the environment, continue with no regard for the future of our planet.
There are so many plans and hopes I have for this land, for me, my family, blood and chosen, and future generations of our lineage. Will climate change fueled by human greed and hubris take that away?
I am overwhelmed by climate change and global warming. But inaction never affects change. I can do my part on these few acres.
I think of Agent Smith’s words in The Matrix: “Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.”
This doesn’t have to be true. We don’t have to exist like viruses. This hasn’t always been the way.
Who can we look to in order to learn how to live in harmony with the earth? What adjustments can we make? Are we willing?
For the benefit of the earth and future generations?
I read8 that since wolves were reintroduced back into Yellowstone in the 90s, an unexpected trophic cascade of ecological change occurred, including helping beaver populations flourish and bringing back aspen and other vegetation. Some9 even claim that the wolves changed the rivers by feasting on elk that overgrazed. The vegetation was able to grow, thus reducing erosion and stabilizing riverbanks, so the rivers meandered less, the channels deepened and small pools formed.
How can we re-establish this natural equilibrium with the earth, the way the wolves have in Yellowstone?
Kimmerer writes: “How in our modern world, can we find one way to understand the earth as a gift again, to make our relationship with the world sacred again?…even in market economy, can we behave ‘as if’ the living world were a gift?”
I see my mother’s hands in the dirt. I smell the mossy, wet of freshly upturned soil. I see my hands, the soil caked under my nails and in the creases of my skin. I am demonstrating to my daughter the nourishment the earth can gift you if you take care of it.
I started collecting wildflowers last spring. I only ever take enough to make a few bouquets. The intention is to brighten our home; to see my daughter smile when she notices the one by her bed and my wife’s eyes twinkle when I place one on the table when we sit for dinner; to feel that deep exhale my body releases when I’m writing or teaching and look over to see the sunlight shining on the bouquet.
Endnotes:
Photographs by and courtesy of the author, unless otherwise noted.
1 deMause, Neil. “How The 1977 Blackout Was Bushwick’s Grimmest Moment.” Gothamist, 28 Sept. 2016, gothamist.com/news/how-the-1977-blackout-was-bushwicks-grimmest-moment.
2 Davitt, M. J. (2020, October 28). Remembering Hurricane Sandy: The Only Storm That Ever Scared Me. Spectrum News NY1. https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/weather/2020/10/28/the-only-storm-that-ever-scared-me–a-meteorologist-remembers-hurricane-sandy
3 Freedman, Andrew. (2012, November 1). How Global Warming Made Hurricane Sandy Worse. Climate Central. https://www.climatecentral.org/news/how-global-warming-made-hurricane-sandy-worse-15190
4 Chappell, Bill. “Why Ida Hit The Northeast So Hard, 1,000 Miles Away From Its Landfall.” NPR, 13 Sept. 2021, www.npr.org/2021/09/03/1034058911/hurricane-ida-climate-change-northeast-flooding-rainfall.
5 Chow, Denise, et al. “U.N. Releases Blistering Assessment on the State of Climate Change.” NBC News, 9 Aug. 2021, www.nbcnews.com/science/environment/un-releases-blistering-assessment-state-climate-change-rcna1622.
6 Borunda, Alejandra. “The Science Connecting Wildfires to Climate Change.” National Geographic, 3 May 2021, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/climate-change-increases-risk-fires-western-us.
7 “Insects Are Vanishing from Our Planet at an Alarming Rate. But There Are Ways to Help Them.” The Guardian, 29 Oct. 2021, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/21/insects-vanishing-alarming-help.
8 GrrlScientist. “How Wolves Change Rivers – Video.” The Guardian, 14 Feb. 2018, www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2014/mar/03/how-wolves-change-rivers.
9 Farquahr, Brodie. “Wolf Reintroduction Changes Ecosystem in Yellowstone.” Yellowstone National Park, 1 July 2021, www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wildlife/wolf-reintroduction-changes-ecosystem.
