“If I loved anything more than the spreadsheet (for the plans for next year’s garden), it was the seed catalogs. They were my porn- temptation on every single page, photograph after photograph of plump turnips and fat carrots, juicy fruits and glistening tomatoes. Some of the cannier seed dealers went not with photos but with line drawings. These were even more powerful. I filled the white space in my imagination with not only vibrant produce but also my fantasies of being an old-time gentleman farmer. Every listing burst with promise, every seed packet shouted with hope. Nothing had failed yet. All was still possible.” (Jeff Chu, Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand)
Nothing is much better than a seed catalog to get your mind and heart set on a positive future. Burpee’s and Park Seed (from my home state of South Carolina) have filled my mind with desires untold since I was a youth. Though I had no experience growing anything other than the sea-monkeys I ordered from the back of my comic books, I knew I could bring in tomatoes for sandwiches all summer if I had the chance. Is there a way you can grow Duke’s Mayonnaise?
But it’s not just seed catalogs with their promise of abundant gardens. I was captured by the stories of early inventors from the books I checked out of the Inman Library. Blessed by my mother to be a reader from before elementary school, books became my escape from making up beds, picking up yard trash, and drying dishes. It moved me from trying to learn sports I would never excel at- football, baseball, basketball (we were too poor for tennis and nobody played golf)- to seeing a universe where I could make a difference. My heroes were Samuel F.B. Morse, Henry Ford, Eli Whitney, Thomas Edison, and Ben Franklin. So were Marie Curie and George Washington Carver, though I never thought I could be that smart.
Later, stories of people who worked to improve life for all filled my evening hours. Florence Nightingale, Dunant and Moynier, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln all gave me a vision of what life could be like. And, of course, in my teen years, I read of John Wesley, Francis of Assisi, George Müller, Dorothy Day, Teresa of Avila, who worked to make the world better for all because, as Wesley put it, “the love of God was shed abroad in their hearts.”
Later, fiction, mostly science fiction, gave me scenes of the world as it could be and not as it is. Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Madeleine L’Engle described societies where people were more concerned for the general welfare than their riches. As time has marched on, as our technology has advanced, it seems like those worlds are farther away than before. I guess that’s why it’s called fiction.
Today, it seems that our “heroes” are those who stress gain at any cost, including human rights. Worlds where people are put into classes, and never given the chance to advance. George Müller was once condemned for helping people experiencing poverty to “rise above their station.” (I hope to be blamed for something like that.) We have become a zero-sum game world, where if one person succeeds, another has to lose.
Something in me screams that is not how we are meant to be. We can all move ahead. We can all get better. Another person, nation, or race does not have to lose for the rest to get better. I don’t have to lose so that you can win. Something in me wants something more, something better, for us all.
I need a new seed catalog.
Michael Henderson 