Dirt in my Hands

May 15, 2011 at 3:35 pm (The Category-less Category)

Did you know that strawberry plants like to make children, which is why they need to be planted far apart?

Did you know that butternut squash seeds have to be gently set between a level bit of soil and a very thin top cover, or else they won’t grow?

Did you know that chamomile keeps the pepper and tomato eating bugs away?

Well, now you know.

I helped my friend Oxana work in her garden today. Oxana is a relatively new friend—I only met her last Christmas, almost exactly a year after I’d moved to my town. She’s 22 and an English teacher at the local village school, but she lives pretty close to me in the center of town. She comes across as a very timid person, but she is possibly one of the most mature 22 year olds I’ve ever met. Both her parents died while she was young, and after she graduated from a university in a large city, she moved back to our small town to live with her grandmother and work. She has no siblings, all of her friends live 10 hours away, and her grandmother has a broken hip and cannot get out of bed.

Almost from the first conversation we had, I think both of us realized that we have a lot in common in reference to our lives in this town. We’re both kind of lonely, we’re both separated from our friends and we’ve both taken on responsibilities that many people our age have not. Most 22 year olds I know, when they move back home after school, they fall back into a dependent role. Oxana, on the other hand, is the provider. For some reason this seems to make it much easier for me to relate with her. Rather than the usual Ukrainian reaction of pity and surprise at how independent my life as a young woman in Ukraine is, she simply acknowledges that we are kind of doing the same things.

(There is something I need to point out. Oxana is not married, does not have a boyfriend and does not have children. It is common for a girl her age to be in one of those 3 positions, and so when I say that it’s easy for me to relate with her, a large part of that has to do with the fact that most Ukrainian girls I meet around my age are almost always in a relationship, which creates a type of maturity very different from the kind that comes with true independence.)

Oxana’s usually very busy with school and clubs, and I have been on a pretty steady stream of travel lately, so we don’t see each other too often. We go for walks when we both have time and catch up on each other’s lives.

The other day on our walk she went on and on about how much she hates working in her garden, but she has to do it because her grandmother has all these plants that need to be taken care of. I, of course, as the wide-eyed, garden deprived suburban girl that I am, volunteered immediately to help her. She didn’t take me seriously at first and joked that the Peace Corps would get mad at her for making me do manual labor. I almost had to beg, making it clear that I really wanted to do this, that I didn’t see it as an unpleasant obligation but more as an excuse to do something outside other than go for walks or runs.

This has been the kind of funny thing about my service here. No one seems to want to make me do anything. My counterpart is constantly sending me home from school, telling me that she doesn’t need me to help with a lesson here or there, thinking that I’d rather have the time off. Oxana is the same, thinking that I’d rather not help her with her English club or in her garden, because doesn’t everybody want to relax? The thing is though, I have NOTHING ELSE TO DO. I don’t have a family here, I don’t have any obligations other than teaching. And if I’m not teaching…..I go a little crazy. Hence the amount of travelling I’ve been doing, trying to keep myself busy finding projects anywhere I can get them.

But back to the garden. I went to Oxana’s house today to do my first yard work since living with my host family almost 2 years ago. We only worked for about 2 hours, but I enjoyed it. We planted tomatoes, making sure to put 2 plants to a hole and creating a small moat around them to hold water. The bitter peppers also required moats, but they are picky plants and prefer a hole to themselves. We planted the strawberries in rows, making sure to leave room for their babies they will create, and we delicately placed bunches of 3 squash seeds each far, far apart from each other alongside the sweet peppers that also need the one plant per hole solitude their more bitter relatives prefer. Beneath the apple tree, pear tree, plum tree and sweet cherry tree, we watered the tomatoes, bitter peppers, sweet peppers, onions, strawberries, cucumbers, sorrel, squash, chamomile and carrots, making sure to go back over each plant after it had been watered to dust dry soil over the wet patches. (Because the water evaporates, and if you don’t cover it there is no point in watering the plant anyways. Interesting, huh? I’ve never thought of that.)

You can’t help but feel encouraged to try a garden of your own when you live in Ukraine. Everyone’s got one. Oxana, even though she hates working in the garden, says that the she’d rather do the work to grow her own vegetables than eat the ones at the market. There is a beetle they call the Colorado bug that has recently begun eating all the tomatoes, peppers and potatoes, and the vegetables and fruits in the market are almost all covered in pesticides (and here I am thinking their organic). So she grows her own with a strong defense of chamomile and onion, hoping that the pesticides are unnecessary.

I’ve always said to myself, “Jessica, when you grow up and are an adult and have a house and a yard, you are going to grow a garden.” And I mean, I probably said that to myself yesterday. Seeing Oxana, at 22, working as a self-sufficient provider of a household, I feel more than encouraged to get my butt off the “when I grow up” chair.