My child is out back eating leaves — and i’m loving It

It began with the onion grass.

Tufts of it came up in the yard like the beards of garden gnomes, waking from a long winter’s sleep. The smell greeted us each morning as we went to take stock of spring’s latest offering: forsythia, magnolia, dogwood. The onion grass was a much less flashy sight — just a scruff of green amidst a thousand other greens, shades of celadon and celery and jade all vying for attention — but it pulled us toward it with its unmistakable scent.

Here, I said to my son, plucking a blade and holding it out to him. A tiny white bulb still clung to its root. River was not yet two. He looked at me in wonder for a moment, and I could almost hear his mind working in that misty realm at the edge of speech. Then he shoved the grass in his mouth and chewed.

As the weather warmed and the light clung to the sky a bit later each evening, I’d watch River run around the yard with shaggy wads of onion grass hanging from his lips. At first, he’d occasionally misidentify a patch, and I’d quickly swoop in to correct him, but soon he could differentiate the grasses on his own. Onion grass, he learned, had not only the telltale scent but also a slightly more rounded body. It grew in tight clumps with curlicue tops, in a shade of green a bit deeper than what surrounded it. I watched with pride as he feasted, my little billy goat, nipping at the grass.

I had stopped nursing him the autumn before; a dramatic finale, a cold-turkey weaning after I contracted a tick-borne illness and had to take antibiotics. I cried as River latched for the last time. His hand found my mouth, his fingers cupping my teeth, as we assumed our familiar pose — like a Mary Cassatt portrait of devotion. Then it was done.

How hard it is, I thought then, to be inside the shape of an ending — to know the exact moment when something is over. So often, endings pass unnoticed and unmarked: When was the last time River wore his favorite fruit pajamas before they got too small? Which rain was the final rain that fell on our old house? When was the last time my mother held me in her arms?

That spring, I taught my boy how to eat from the earth. We picked garlic mustard and nettles and made them into pesto. After boiling and blanching the nettles to remove the sting, we watched the sauce turn neon green. Then there were the edible flowers: the purple violets that we put on top of teacakes, and the fallen white stars of chickweed that garnished our salads. Watching River forage, I felt joy and relief, knowing my child was being fed by the body of the land.

Spring turned to high summer, and there came a day when the onion grass was gone. Why no more ug-ion grass? River asked, a look of bewilderment and sadness in his eyes. Which clump was the last he’d tasted before the plant died? He had not gotten to say goodbye.

I told him then about seasons. How they come to an end and begin again. How the world teaches us that precious things are sometimes lost, but that something else returns.

Summer brought heat and thunder and berries. Fat black raspberries came bursting from the bushes that lined our street. For weeks, River’s face and hands were stained purple. I was careful to steer him away from the red honeysuckle berries, poisonous to humans. Leave them for the birds! I’d cry as he reached for the crimson jewels. And so we called them “bird berries,” and he learned to save them for our feathered friends.

The berries came and went too. Autumn passed into winter. In the grocery store, berries that tasted of nothing moldered in plastic containers. We waited and rested and dreamed through that long season, and then one March morning, the grass began to sing again with a scent we remembered. I watched River greet the first tufts of onion grass like an old friend.

Time passes. It catches us in its eddies, disorients, and reshapes us like wind on water. We can’t always know when things end, but we can mark the magic of when they begin. I will always remember the moment when I showed River the miracle of seasons. When I gave him the keys to a knowledge that will sustain him even after I’m gone. Foraging is the ultimate act of care. When we care enough to notice, to identify and name what grows around us, we are not only stewarding this earth but nourishing it. And it, in turn, feeds us.