A Visit with Mr. Dillon June 17, 2014 People who bother. “The garden is a nice idea…”Mr Dillon says. We “need to do something….” but getting people to come out and contribute their labor seems to be the current challenge for the Yes We Can! Garden on E. 2nd St. This seems to be the current challenge for many of the beginning and long term Community Gardens in Mansfield. Let us set that important issue aside for now. Let’s talk about those who do show up, who do the work, who do bother. Michael Pollan, a writer and reporter, mostly on food issues, whose books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food sold widely, continues to play on the ever relevant theme about people and their relationship to food. I will be highlighting his writing over these next nine weeks that I, as the Vista AmeriCorps Volunteer on behalf of NECIC, will be working in the Community Gardens. As a true skeptic in the spirit of the original Latin version of the term, I read and apply, listen and test, observe and attempt. I try not to immediately dismiss ideas nor directly embrace them, so I do not use M. Pollan’s thinking as that of the ultimate authority because after all, your own thinking in relationship to your life experience and research is your ultimate authority, nevertheless I will be using M. Pollan’s thinking as a way to frame the discussion about our relationship with food and the work done in the Community Gardens. Michael Pollan cares. He cares about people being healthy, the planet being healthy. And he does his homework. He reads, he talks with people, he researches, he cross-­‐
references. This is a useful combination. “For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we’re
living our lives suggests we’re not really serious about changing–something our
politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do,” Michael Pollan
states in his New York Times Magazine 2008 article, “Why Bother?”
Mr. Dillon and I are hoeing the dusty weeds in the Yes We Can! Garden and
chatting here and there.
“My mother, woke up, cooked breakfast, went to pick cotton, picked 200 pounds, came back and cooked dinner.” Mr. Dillon is originally from Angie, Louisiana. “Was your mother upset that you only picked 50 pounds?” “Naw, picking cotton was not my cup of tea. She saw that.” The soil in the Yes, We Can! Garden, dark and lovely, hosts tomatoes, beans, eggplants, two pea plants and one melon. The National Guard did a wonderful job clearing the space and preparing the garden area. Mr. Dillon says he will need stakes for his pole beans and volunteers for the garden. He works with the Mary McLeod-­‐Bethune Intervention and Enrichment Center on the south side of Mansfield. The seniors like the idea of the garden. They do not necessarily want to work in it in the hot humid summer. I personally cannot blame them. If I have spent my life working, particularly picking cotton, vegetables or other manual labor, I probably do not want to do more of it in my retirement years, if I had a choice. “Are you willing to pay a person to maintain the garden?” I ask him. “Well, we don’t’ have the funds right now-­‐ we’re working on that.” Still, the garden is there, and although all the plants look beautifully healthy and the soil rich, it will probably still need attention in the future – weeding, hoeing, harvesting. Mr. Dillon shakes the tomato flowers a little to pollinate them, “just in case the bees don’t get to it.” “Planting a garden is one of the most powerful things an individual can do – to reduce your carbon footprint, [and] to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-­‐energy mind,” says M. Pollan. Mr. Dillon’s effort is no cheap effort. These Community Gardens are no cheap effort by those who do them. They are a huge step towards a saner relationship to our natural world. Thank you for bothering Mr. Dillon.