Chapter 6
She arrived at the gardens early and sat in her car while she mentally prepared her checklist. She found that if she launched into this work without a plan first, she easily got distracted and overwhelmed by the sheer level of work it took to keep a garden going.
Gardening was an everyday, interactive job.
Leaving a garden untended for too long made it vulnerable to being overrun by weeds or pests.
She had unfortunately neglected it somewhat over the last two weeks as she transitioned to working more indoors.
She would definitely need to hire someone to help keep up with the manual labor, and thankfully she now had the budget to do just that.
Unfortunately that only added one more task to her ever-growing to do list, that would also unfortunately spiral into multiple other subtasks.
She knew she needed to write a job description and send it to someone to get it approved first.
Fuck, is that person Rowan?
She banged her head against the steering wheel, horn screaming as a symbol of how loud she wished she herself could scream. She kept it there until she couldn’t stand the sound anymore.
“Fuck!” She screamed into the void, tensing her fists, and finally letting her forehead off the horn to replace the noise with her shouting instead.
That scream felt good, at least a little cathartic.
She rested her head on the headrest, let out a deep breath, and closed her eyes for a few minutes, guiding herself through some positive self talk like yes, you can actually fucking do this and yes, we are embracing chaos as the plotline.
It was impressive how everything could fall apart with such precision.
She turned her head to the side when she noticed a truck pulling into the lot several feet down from her.
Squinting her eyes, she asked herself out loud, “Is that Rowan’s dad’s old truck?
” She let out another deep breath, albeit this time in a more exasperated tone, threatening to upset the somewhat inner calm she had just managed to achieve. “Damnit, why is she here early too?”
No two Native people had any right to show up to the same place early. Downright unheard of. What were they trying to do, out-professional each other? She had just wanted a few minutes in peace to ground herself before she had to play nice. Or nicer.
Juniper got out of her car and approached Rowan’s. She wasn’t going to let her come to her. She was going to assert dominance over this situation and call the shots. Because yes, this seemed like the right way to get off on the right foot.
“Didn’t expect you to be bumming a ride off your pops, fancy lawyer,” Juniper yelled out as she approached the truck, a devious smile curling the corner of her lips.
Where did that fall on the spectrum of nice to bitchy? Probably somewhere in the middle. Well, probably somewhere on the bitchier side of the middle. It still felt marginally better.
Rowan hopped out and shrugged nonchalantly. “He wasn’t using this one anymore, and I don’t have a car. You don’t really need to drive in the city.”
“Oh right,” Juniper shot back smugly, her head tilting back in a mirthless laugh. “How could anyone forget you lived there?”
She caught Rowan rolling her eyes as she leaned one elbow on the window opening of the driver’s side door.
“I have to admit I’m surprised to see that fishing hook attached to the bill of your hat,” Juniper indicated toward her with a head nod. “I bet they don’t see that often in the city.”
Evidently becoming self-conscious of the beaten-in light blue Columbia Law baseball cap she was wearing, Rowan took it off to scratch the back of her head. So Juniper was getting under her skin. She remembered that little move.
“We come from fishermen. It’s not like that’s something I’m not proud of, or isn’t a huge part of who I am.”
“Yeah? What river do they let you fish out of up there?”
“What? You don’t think I know what it’s like to come from here anymore?” Rowan shifted slightly and her voice took a bitter tone. “I don’t have to explain myself to you, Juniper.”
Hearing her full name like that, exactly how she’d requested it be said, out of the mouth of someone who had only ever called her by her nickname didn’t actually end up making her feel any better. But she just couldn’t help herself. Taking one step closer into Rowan’s space, she narrowed her eyes.
“I’m not asking for an explanation. I’m just trying to piece together who you are now.”
“Who I am?” Rowan pushed herself off the edge of the truck door and mirrored the step in.
“Yeah, who you are.”
Juniper couldn’t stop poking once she had gotten started.
The heart she always wore on her sleeve thundered in rebellion of her brain’s desire to be rational.
She had set out to do a better job today at being less negative, displaying her emotions so openly a little less.
But there was something so deeply infuriating about this particular version of Rowan standing in front of her.
“Hopefully you’ll give yourself a chance to find out.”
Rowan stepped back to reach into the window of the old truck and ripped out an equally beaten-in backpack. Without waiting for an answer, she paced toward the front gates of the garden.
When Juniper focused on the garden beyond Rowan’s sulking frame, she paused internally.
She couldn’t allow herself to walk into the garden behaving like this.
From the very first time Juniper dropped her first seeds into the ground, she realized this was about much more than agriculture for her.
She had control over how her environment grew, her contributions to nurturing it, and the peace and restoration it brought her.
If planted intentionally, gardens could be a full sensory experience of colors, textures, shapes, with aromatics lining walking paths, colorful flower beds lining the perimeter, a place to connect with nature in privacy, protected from the stress of what lay just outside its borders.
And the repetitive processes of tending the garden showed Juniper that her dedication, her very presence, had a distinctly real effect on life evolving around her, something that she hadn’t ever really felt before.
She was connected to the very act of setting life into motion, and each row she planted was like a new lifeline she created for herself.
So when she walked through the gates Rowan held open for her, the power of the environment she’d cultivated around herself helped shift her mood considerably. She didn’t actually want to fight. She wanted to share.
She took a deep breath. “Follow me.”
She led and Rowan followed through the first several rows of plants, each of those lifelines pulsing with emerging life, vibrancy, sustainment.
Juniper provided detailed information on the origins of each plant and their planting and harvesting cycles and water needs.
She also outlined the proper transplant and establishment methods for plants she’d propagated from local varieties on the Reservation to also grow in the garden.
Juniper paused and turned back to face Rowan, who was feverishly taking notes in a legal pad she had pulled out somewhere in the journey along the second row, between Juniper’s lessons on making oil from sunflower seeds and the different utilizations their Tribe had for greens.
She had to admit it was kind of cute and reminiscent of their elementary and middle school days when they would occasionally get the opportunity to go on a field trip somewhere cool, like to the science museum or to that week-long bay restoration field school they had gotten scholarships to attend after eighth grade.
Juniper had always been somewhat of an intellectual renegade, a doer, an experimenter, preferring to learn everything about what she wanted to know and leaving the rest. Rowan had been more of a studious learner, an observer, a reflector, committing things to memory and reading a hundred books on every topic under the sun.
“I’m still trying to work out how to cultivate salicornia and wild asparagus, but I’m not as familiar with saltwater variety plants. In my research, I’ve seen where others have been successful in cultivating them intentionally. That’s where I intend to turn my focus next. My next experiment.”
She watched Rowan look up from her notes to her, then back down as she kept writing.
Juniper continued on, raising an eyebrow.
“Of course, wild asparagus isn’t indigenous.
It’s kind of feral actually. It escaped cultivation over 400 years ago after Europeans brought it over.
However, we’ve been eating it since close to that time.
It kind of begs the question, what makes something an Indigenous practice?
Does it have to be pre-European contact?
Or if Indigenous people do it, can’t that make it Indigenous enough? ”
“Right,” Rowan furrowed her brow and brought her pen to her lips to tap it a few times, “that makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that perspective.”
Juniper watched the way the pen pressed into her lips as she was deep in thought. She quickly looked back at the rows of plants in front of her. “Either way, it grows easily here, it’s high in vitamin K and folate, especially important for pregnant folks, and our people like to eat it.”
They continued walking, Juniper leading the way and Rowan following.
Juniper was kind of enjoying being able to show off.
Kind of a lot. She described the specific method of soil testing and balancing she had undergone to re-establish their community’s knowledge, especially considering her propensity to try and grow plants that required a diverse array of soil composition and water needs.