SPRING IN TIlE LAND-AND HUNGER
McCarthy, Abigail
pA SCHALTmE and spring coincide L this year. They do not always do that for those of us who live north of the 39th parallel, but when they do there is a happy sense of the fitness of things....
...And America is still bountiful enough to feed the world's hungry...
...We slip back for awhile into the preoccupations of our forebears--earth and rain and seed and sun...
...Things get at gardens...
...The most painful aspect of the Hearst kidnapping to many was that there were people hungry enough themselves-or moved by the need of their dependents-to set aside human dignity for food procured at a blood price...
...These cosmic concerns drain us of the renewed energy which springs from Easter and the witness borne by plants bursting from seed and thrusting upward to the light...
...Scattered throughout this country, even in the heart of cities, are small and large pieces of land which are unused, or whose use might easily be changed to permit growing food...
...New birds stop at the feeder every day," says one, and "I limed the side lawn yesterday," I read in another, "The lilies of the valley are coming up by the back steps where the sun strikes all day long...
...As long as I can remember there have been people working small plots near an apartment complex on once-fashionable Connecticut Avenue, and another little plantation of gardens near the ill-named Washington Home for Incurables...
...We think as they did of the promise of the land, of what we can plant and grow and reap, even if we actually do no more than daydream over the seed company advertisements in the Sunday supplements...
...Urban dwellers can and do take to gardening in earnest as those who remember World War II victory gardens can attest...
...Those who would give the hungry of the high rises and the city streets gardens must also give them patient help along the way...
...they are not born...
...It is an appealing suggestion...
...Our forebears came here seeking food more often than they sought fame and fortune...
...all of these offer thousands of acres of land which, if made available to persons of fixed and low income, might help ease hunger and the nagging anxiety of inflation and lack of food . . . . With this in mind, we urge readers to undertake the establishment o/ community gardens with individual plots in which people might grow ]ood /or their own use...
...Some people never gave them up...
...Soil must be built up, and it is a hard fact that there is a great deal of unyielding hardpan left by bulldozers under the smiling mask of city lawns...
...In suburban Arlington, Virginia, the county board offered 70 garden plots on county land...
...Boston offers land in Back Bay...
...10 May 1974:232...
...I never lived in a small town where a gardener with a patch of melons or sweet corn didn't keep a shot gun loaded with rock salt handy...
...Of course, a nagging realism warns that gardeners are made through years of trial and work...
...Not all land bears the first year...
...But the suggestion of the staff of the Center of Concern has larger scope and implications...
...Never mind, for a bit, the gloomy predictions of stripmining which will rob the West and Midwest of rich topsoil it took centuries to build...
...a Wisconsin religious community offered land last year at an empty seminary, and presumably will do so again...
...Put in the back of our minds-for a little while--Justice Douglas saying, with foreboding, that he wished we loved our land enough to quit, once and for all, ripping it up with highways and developments...
...Resurrection is affirmed by every breaking leaf and bud...
...The Center of Concern here in Washington reminds us in a recent newsletter that many people are hungry and will grow hunSPRING IN THE LAND -AND HUNGER ABIGAIL McCARTHY grier still as food costs soar to the levels predicted for this year...
...Every letter from Minnesota or Massachusetts these days mentions spring...
...Borers and slugs and rabbits and weeds vie for the fruits of your hard work, and, when it comes to picking time, the light-fingered can wipe out a summer's work in less than an hour...
...Might not sharing gardens spread generosity, gentleness, and good sense like an infection--subtly changing everything...
...There is a healing of the senses and the heart in these things...
...And the smallest garden plot involves a lot of stoop labor...
...Gardens are testaments to hope...
...Or Robert Lowell brooding with poetic angst over the violence betokened by the constant, restless changing and digging in our cities...
...Municipal lands, diocesan and parish properties, land held by religious orders, schools and colleges, private property...
...We believe that there is a way to help at the local level in a way that will build up local communities and speak of Christ's values," write the editors of Quest, the Center newsletter...
...They point to efforts already under way: Kermit Gordon, president of the Brookings Institution wrote to the Washington Post this year that the institution offered the use of a large part of its grounds again this year so that its neighbors, residents of the center city --if not of the inner city as the euphemism has it--in the hope that "tomatoes, green beans, and cucumbers will again flourish on P Street this year...
...For the moment, let us give some thought to simple answers, to the needs right at hand...
...Still, why should we not try it...
...No one who shops for food can doubt that the poor must be hungry, especially old people on pensions and families with children...
Vol. 100 • May 1974 • No. 10
