The Garden

COVID walks, crops, and thoughts on growth

Early spring of 2020.

Even just writing it, seeing “2020” on a computer screen, or paper, or anywhere…to say it gives me chills isn’t entirely accurate I suppose, but I definitely feel a physical reaction. Like my whole body just sort of slumps a bit, and my energy, no matter where it was prior, comes at least slightly down. It’s comfortably in our rear view at this point but the experience of that year is something that I feel confident in saying none of us will forget, regardless of what our experience was.

I have many friends, family and colleagues whose situation was far worse than mine, and it’s possible that for even some of you reading this…your situation was far worse than mine. On the whole though, I can assume my situation heading into that March while the details are certainly different, the bulk of it is the same. I was coming into the new year just like everybody else, with goals and timelines and plans and mind-maps. I had released a single called “Happy Songs” that January that I was very proud of, I had just attended and showcased at a folk music conference in Kansas City and had lined up several tour dates alongside other artists based in Nashville and Chattanooga where we would trade shows in each other's cities. Though it was only planned to be a few tour dates, this was definitely one of the greater touring accomplishments and organizations for me at that time.

Anyway, you get it…this article isn’t nearly as useful to you if it’s just all about the intricate details of my life at that time. Nobody cares. But I only highlight these details to show that all of us, in some way shape or form, were in a stage of readiness to grow…and no matter what our emotions were towards it, we were all ready for the inevitable next phase. Because that’s how time works. It passes, things change, we change, and we grow.

But as we all know now, that’s not exactly how this year went. There wasn’t the typical “next phase”, and time felt like it stopped.

Neighborhood Walks

At the time of lockdown I was living in a small neighborhood just outside of the University of Memphis campus. Once it became clear that this whole pandemic thing wasn’t going to go away quickly, and I was going to be without many choices for activities for the foreseeable future…I began to walk. I took walks prior to the pandemic but these were different. These were not just kill-time walks and get-some-fresh-air-because-I-haven’t-had-much-of-that kind of walks. These were ‘I guess I’ll rethink everything about my life and also somehow not think about anything at all and also walk further than I ever have before, exploring parts of this neighborhood I never knew existed’ kinds of walks. 2020 walks were different.

The campus itself was walking distance from my home, about ten minutes to get to campus and then you could spend another 20-25 minutes just walking around the campus itself, and then another ten or so minutes back. Close to an hour of walking time. Oftentimes I’d walk over and bring my laptop and sit outside of the library, which was locked, but just close enough that I could connect to the wifi and sit there and, well, not do very much I suppose. I can’t really remember…but I do recall just spending hours outside between the two legs of my walk.

Then there’s just my neighborhood. I live on one big block which is then connected to another block, which is connected to a few more and then there’s a little stone bridge that crosses over into another set of 3 or 4 blocks of homes. Nothing too extraordinary…but I promise you I saw all of these houses on every block dozens of times before everything was all said and done.

I would always start my walk taking the same route. I would leave my house, turn right down my street, pass a few houses, then I’d make a right and get all the way to the end of that street, then either turn left to go to campus, or turn right to wander around the community. When I made that first right, about halfway down the straight and narrow street, was a middle class home that had a small yard to the right of the home. (to the left of the house if you were looking at the house from the street) It wasn’t a big yard, maybe 20-30 yards. It came right up to the sidewalk and traveled back behind the house. And about halfway in, there was a big dip in the yard, so it slanted as it passed into the back of the home.

I had lived in this neighborhood for 2 years prior to 2020 and that patch of grass, that medium sized yard that belonged to that home, it had always been just that. A patch of grass. But a few weeks into the spring, I walked by one day and noticed a large rectangle where it seemed like most of the grass had been pulled out. Then another day or two later there were a few large sticks poking out of the ground…followed by a dense layer of soil that was laid down. A few days later I’d walk by, and there was some noticeable ridge tillage, or raised beds of soil to make way for whatever was going to be planted. Sometimes I’d even see the lady who was crafting all of this, a woman hard at work under the Memphis May sun which can be very brutal at times, and even worse the further you travel into the summer.