Stories & Plants
Stories & Plants
By A.T.
My youngest child was becoming a teenager right as smart phones really took over. At the time we lived in a suburb of Denver, surrounded by upper middle class to wealthy parents eager to provide their kids with the latest in everything, who indeed felt a duty to do so. We meanwhile had almost no money. Due to several circumstances in those years, my daughter attended public school, a hotbed of pressure to conform everywhere, but especially in very conformist suburban Denver.
Meanwhile we lived in an apartment in a friend’s basement and sold our artwork at festivals and craft shows. Even more mortifying for my daughter, the modest brick house was surrounded not by the usual Home Depot pavers and anemic plantings, but permaculture food forest. How embarrassed she was of the gigantic sunflowers nodding crazily over the driveway….
By her junior year I confess I folded to a smart phone. Her misery in not fitting in was real and at moments took on dangerous proportions. I tried to pull her out to homeschool in these years, but she refused. Here is where I got creative.
First I found a prestigious summer film school program for teenagers in Denver proper. I (heavily) helped her get a scholarship to attend for free, then basically had to force her to attend, both years. The program exposed her to a more diverse group of kids from varied walks of life. She has since, as an adult, commented many times that that aspect alone helped her to contextualize her own experiences as a misfit. Then there was the program itself. The teenagers handled every aspect of creating their own short films, from screenwriting and directing to production and post-production. Storytelling became the great love of my daughter’s life.
At the same time I implemented wild and medicinal plants. I took my daughter with me - sometimes kicking and screaming - on walks to the nearby lake, where we foraged wild greens for dinner or seed-bombed areas that hadn’t yet been paved over. I introduced her to local herbalists and went on plant identification walks with them. Most importantly, I began taking her to regional herbal conferences. There she met all kinds of young adult plant folk, none of whom would blend in easily in an American shopping mall!
By senior year my daughter was ready to graduate early and get out of literal and metaphorical high school forever. Now in her later twenties, she lives off-grid in a tiny house in the mountains with her boyfriend and dog, tending her large garden, eating wild greens with every evening meal, voraciously reading real paper books, making music and making stories for both money and pleasure.
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