Reflections on Resilience in Uncertain Times

The Borrowed Garden Story and photos by Abigail R. Dockter This spring, I did not have a garden. My work often takes me out of town, and the only plants that tolerate my absence are three small agaves in pots on the back porch and one adorably ugly Dorstenia in the front window. As the impacts of COVID-19 ballooned across the U.S. this past spring (especially in Arizona, where I live) and as hoarding impulses ran amok and food supply and distribution systems were disrupted, I rebooted my Community Supported Agriculture share. Down the street, my local Middle Eastern market did a roaring trade at three in the afternoon, the parking lot packed with new clientele.

I was not a first-time CSA customer, but I had just managed to talk another friend, Sally, into splitting the cost and the bounty.

Community Supported Agriculture is a subscription model in which customers buy into local farms and are repaid in produce — vegetables, in my case, although CSAs also exist for meat, milk, honey, and other products. The Tucson CSA benefits from a year-round growing season and a dense urban area of potential customers. But with farming, you always take what you get, and Sally was skeptical at first. She worried about the cost, the limitations of eating only what is harvested locally each week, and whether she might end up with too much food or too little. I’m a worrier too, but also, lately, a CSA evangelist. During the pandemic, it has changed my life.

Aside from inventing infinite variations on the peanut butter tortilla, I have never been an inspired or talented cook. But the CSA reversed the standard culinary logic in a way that made sense to me: Instead of choosing recipes and then getting ingredients, I was given ingredients and went in search of recipes. I polled my friends and relatives — “What the heck do you do with collard greens?” — and trawled the internet for advice about rutabagas. I developed new instincts for cooking and combining foods, a creative intuition I’d never exercised before. I understood for the first time how those instincts are slightly different for different people, depending on the culinary traditions you draw from and the ways you’ve departed from what your family fed you as a child.

Sally turned out to love the CSA as much as I did, though her experience was greatly influenced by the circumstances of the pandemic. “I hardly ever go to the grocery store!” she told me, delighted, five weeks in. The nutritious greens of spring — beet tops, curly kale, amaranth, and purple cabbage — fortified us. Tucson’s CSA is running at capacity with a full waitlist this year, just as the heritage seed provider Native Seed/SEARCH asked their customers to limit the number of seed packets they buy at one time, making sure there are enough for the Native American communities the organization serves. This spring, new gardens sprang up. Seeds sold out; chickens sold out. Suddenly, the roads our food took to get to us seemed long, with too many opportunities for something to go wrong along the way.

Outside, the heat grew in intensity. The radio was terrifying, and social media felt absurdly loud in the quiet rooms where we suddenly spent all our time, alone, trying not to contemplate our own vulnerabilities or those of the people we love. I nursed my disappointments over how I thought my life this year would go. Resilience, the bounceback, the weathering of crisis, is on a growing list of words I believe in 16