Home-Grown

The spinach collects on the ground. Snip. Snip. Mom cuts away fresh crisp spinach leaves for the roast lamb dinner. I select the ripest grape tomatoes, relieving the tomato plant of some its bounty, and into the wicker basket they go. Just a few days ago we were in Vancouver caught up with the 2010 Olympics and Oh Canada! Today I companionably select produce from my mother's small vegetable and herb garden in Africa.

Jet lag and the tiredness that enveloped me right up to our departure on the evening Canada lost Gold in Women's curling to Sweden seeps out with each motion of companionable silence in the vegetable garden. Rest starts to find room in my body and my spirit.

Mom and I add the spinach to the basket. Mom turns to select radishes. I don't recognise her bald head. A smattering of baby fine hair struggles to establish itself like tender grass growing on a wind-ravaged rocky outcrop. When Mom looks at me and I see her face, her freckles, her warm eyes and the lines that have made themselves at home on her face, I know her well. Yet when she turns from me, she is a foreigner to me. I do not know the contours of this bald head.

In the kitchen, I wash the spinach and we shred it into a pot - the luxury of time. At home I buy ready-washed spinach. Time is of the essence after a day of work. Less time spent preparing food is more time spent with busyness elsewhere. City stress seeps out and down the sink's drain with the soil from the spinach.

I chop the sugared mint leaves on the board. I remember doing this when I was a young girl I say to Mom. I remember picking the mint in the back garden and making the mint sauce for our Sunday lunch lamb roasts.

I always made the mint sauce when we had Sunday lunch at my mother-in-law's, my mother remembers. We each have our own memory of home-grown mint, sugared, finely chopped and added to white vinegar.

In the simplicity of preparing the herbs and vegetables I commend my mother for her organic array. Yes, it's home-grown in my garden, she replies. Organic or home-grown - quite the same I muse - it just depends on how close you are to mother earth.