New Life, New Struggles, New Growth

It is definitely still Springtime, and I am thrilled that some little bit of sunshine has finally returned to Portland. If you don't live in the Pacific Northwest or perhaps a tropical rainforest then you may not know what it is like to feel like your feet are starting to mold, and that perhaps that myth about Oregonians growing duck feet is not that far off. I am not really designed for that, and my husband, being a native of Kenya in East Africa is definitely not designed for all that rain. To top that off the little that we managed to preserve from our first year garden last year has all been depleted. I am so tired of grocery store food, I am aching for sun and food directly from our backyard. The recession has also hit our house, neighborhood church, just life in general. We have a friend, another Kenyan immigrant staying with us because he has not been able to find a job for months, our neighbors next door have an in-law staying with them for the same reason and another part of community village has lost her job as well. So I have been thinking more and more about the adage that "real revolutionaries grow their own food."

It seems like despite our best efforts at nonviolent communication, or general togetherness this house has been full of very loud processing while all of the struggles that we face come up. Honestly, it is all here we are very diverse household. Two of us are immigrants, one of us is a child, one of us is queer, most of us are Black, and let just say that income is enough at the moment, but you never know, it can still be tenuous. So Easter fell in the midst of all this, and brought with it the message of new life and I started processing that. Then I had an issue with my tooth that brought unbearable pain, but one of my coworkers at school put me on to squirting Echinacea directly on the area. The earth is miraculous! This was amazing, and then this same week we got our baby chicks.

Here are some pictures of our garden starting to come alive, and the new baby chicks. I still have at least three posts worth of topics to cover today, but I will try to break them into sections so that you can all read the parts that are most interesting to you.