Sowing the seeds of belonging: My father's garden was the place I was safe and welcomed | CBC Life LoadedWhen I was a kid, our backyard garden was one of my favourite places in the entire world — not my mother's thorny rose garden with its ladylike blooms arranged among white patio tiles, but my father's vegetable garden, which lay beyond the apricot, plum and pear trees in an organized jumble that sprang brand new from the soil each spring.
We rarely spoke the word "racism" in my family. Instead of talking these incidents through, we willed them gone with our silence. Yet at times, I sensed their stains on my parents' personalities too. My kind, patient, five-foot-nothing mother would turn into a tiger when teenagers mocked us on the street. Once, we watched from our minivan as my father disputed a parking spot with a woman, whose smug final barb was "Go back where you came from.
Our garden also helped connect us to our community, present and past. Gooseberries and red currants grew beside goji berries. Cherry and beefsteak tomatoes bent over the earth beside thickets of Chinese parsley. When our cellar shelves overflowed, my mother would dispatch us to our neighbours' doorsteps with bags of produce, triggering friendly battles between families striving to outgift each other.
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