It's just a carrot
Except of course it was never going to be “just a carrot.”
Last weekend when our Premier announced that hairdressers could start working again, my husband booked a haircut for the very next day. “It’s symbolic,” he joked. “My curly hair is a symbol of our oppression.” I laughed at him, but I could also relate. Here in Melbourne we have been locked up for so long that everyone is starting to lose perspective, and the little things can feel very big indeed.
My husband has out-of-control hair. I have shingles. My kids are most probably illiterate.
And we are the lucky ones: we have steady incomes, we have each other, and we have our health (although just between us, shingles suck).
Not long ago I bought a take-away coffee from a cafe around the corner from our house, and the owner started to cry. She said, “I don’t know what I’ll do if we’re not allowed to open soon. I haven’t been able to pay my rent for seven months, and I’ve put everything I have into this business. I’m in my 60s and I live alone. What else am I going to do?” She said that if her landlord insisted she pay the missed rent she’d be sleeping “out there,” and gestured to a park bench, still wrapped in “Do not cross” tape because we were not supposed to sit down in public places.
For my part, ever since our second-wave lockdowns tightened in July, I began nursing a fantasy of going out for a walk, and not stopping. Not stopping when my one hour outside allowance was up. Not stopping when I reached the five-kilometre line that we were not supposed to cross. Not even stopping after the nightly 8pm curfew. In my imagination I just kept on walking, and strangers spoke of me as “that crazy, middle-aged lady who is walking her way around the world.” Kind of like Forrest Gump (except that I wanted to walk, not run, because I’m not that crazy).
I almost called this blog post “Run, Forrest!”
I ordered carrot seeds from the Diggers Club back during the first lockdown in March and, when they arrived about two months later (since everyone else seemed to have had the same idea at the same time), I popped them into soil in old egg cartons, and hoped they’d germinate.
Those baby carrots had to survive the entire winter outside in the ground, having their feathery tops battered by winds and munched by marauding possums, overcrowding one another because I didn’t bother to separate the seeds the way I was supposed to, and being generally neglected as my every waking hour was consumed by fitting overdue work commitments in around school-at-home for two children, while indulging fantasies of going for a walk and not stopping.
Yesterday I pulled the carrots out of the ground to make room for snapdragons (priorities, my friend!). Most of them were still small, many of them curly or split in two or twined around each other like lovers. But a few were long and straight like this one here. The children said, “Those look like they come from a shop!” in awed tones, as though this was the highest of possible achievements.
If my husband’s hair is symbolic of our oppression, my carrots are symbolic of our resilience. We can grow, even when the conditions are not… quite… ideal. And we might not all be big and strong: some of us feel very small. Some of us feel split, or wonky, or twisted. But we can still grow, and we still have the capacity to nurture and nourish each other.
The news isn’t looking great here, and the optimism we ventured to feel a week or two ago that things might open up quickly is starting to fade before it even had a chance to bloom, but tomorrow I’m going to make a Sunday roast. I’ll sauté the carrots (straight ones, baby ones and curly-wurly ones all) in butter and orange and honey. And when I serve them up I’ll tell my family they are not just carrots. They are a reminder of our capacity to survive, and grow.
