It looks like an oil painting: sunset-pink radishes, chunky tomatoes, carrots peeking out like old coins. Woven throughout are brushstrokes of green – a meadow, perhaps, or forest floor.

I chew like an aspiring Buddhist, giving the experience my full attention. Something bitter, something spicy and something that tastes like the side of the road. Ahhh. Eating weeds makes me feel virtuous.

I love subscribing to a weekly vegetable delivery from a local farm. When I pay my invoice for the homemade bread and eggs - available as extras - or bite down on something I'll never see in the produce section of the grocery store, I feel certain I am a force for good in the world. It's not just because the vegetables are fresh and interesting and it’s a good thing to do for the local economy, or the value of supporting sustainable agriculture. Those are great reasons, but they do not explain why I glow over each bite. In contrast, I feel quite ho-hum about recycling, and it took me years to remember to bring my own bag to the store.

My parents went organic before it was fashionable – while other kids ate Sloppy Joes in the school cafeteria or opened their lunchboxes to Wonder Bread and Kraft Singles, I bit into a sandwich made with whole wheat bread baked in coffee cans, using wheat we’d ground ourselves, spread with peanut butter so natural you had to get up twenty minutes early to stir it. Mom and Dad were extremely proud of what we ate. We never had much money, but they always said the one thing they would never scrimp on was food. So even though I longed for soda pop and junk food as much as any child, I had the sense that quality food was important, like telling the truth and not calling black people niggers.

My father descends from German Mennonites who immigrated to the United States from Russia. He was two years old in 1934 when his parents joined the desperate migration from Oklahoma to California’s San Joaquin Valley, where my grandparents became tenant farmers. The farming gene lay dormant in him until he was well into his thirties, when it got together with the hermit gene and the get-away-from-your-family-and-in-laws gene to compel him to purchase two tipis and 20 acres in the British Columbia wilderness. In preparation, Mom read us Black Elk Speaks and, just for good measure, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. From these we understood we were supposed to have a deep reverence for The Land and also not expect to be allowed to just sit around and play jacks.

At 13, I would have been more excited by a high-rise apartment with a balcony and a clothing allowance, but I discovered that I enjoyed splitting logs, with the physical effort, the smell of sap and the immediate gratification of a growing pile of firewood. I liked milking our two goats, leaning my head against their warm sides and murmuring soothingly while the milk streamed into the pail. Hauling water from the creek was okay, because I could daydream and stop and rest as often as I wanted – no one was timing how long I was gone. But capital R reverence eluded me and I loathed being assigned to the garden - a monotonous job with dubious rewards. I liked iceberg lettuce, with its watery crunchiness, and ranch dressing from a bottle. And stores. I liked stores.

Still, the romantic image of attractive young couples working the land was irresistible. We were surrounded by them: buff young men in cut-off jeans and glowing women in braids, accessorized with shovels and compost buckets. I watched them swimming naked in the pond, oozing sex and confidence.

At 21, I married a man who loved to spend all his free time growing things. We had a fantastic vegetable garden and beautiful landscaping, and in my memory, the moments we were most connected were the ones spent standing outdoors, surveying our land and planning what we would do next. I still didn’t enjoy gardening, we didn’t work well together and I would have preferred to spend my time pursuing other activities. But when we stood in the waning light, envisioning our modern homestead-slash-Sunset Magazine photo op, I was intoxicated with this fictional version of myself, so integral to the belief in our happiness. 

Our demise began in earnest when we moved to 10 acres with no plantings of any kind. There was not even a sad rhododendron by the front door, and in Washington even the homeless have rhododendrons. Worse, it was November. One day, I stood peering into the drizzle, trying to locate the person who, just a few months before, had seen the mud and blackberries as an invitation to cultivation. Instead, as I contemplated spending years clearing, fencing, digging, planting, pruning and otherwise investing my free time and disposable income working the land, a tourniquet began to contract around my chest.

I look back on my vision of perfect young homesteaders the way I look back on wanting to be a famous ballerina when I was 8. I was in love with the image of myself, not the hours of pointing my toes. The handsome, curly-haired young man and radiant, bandana-wearing young woman who drop off my weekly delivery are like a treasured photograph, reminding me of the power of youthful imagination and the raw, tender metamorphosis from the person we try to be to the person we are meant to become.

Today, spearing the last three leaves of my imperfectly washed salad, I feel a deep appreciation for my hard-working-peasant turned back-to-the-land heritage, and I thank my parents for teaching me that good food is, indeed, important.