Small things can be everything

What to check before practice, where to take the kids, and a Detroit organization worth knowing.

A few weeks ago, my three-year-old, River, came home from preschool with a Mother’s Day present. A little plant wrapped in pink plastic, squatting in a styrofoam cup. No tag, no name. I hugged him, said thank you, and put it on the windowsill.

And then I avoided it.

Every time I looked at the plant, it opened a cascade of demands. Where am I going to plant this? I don’t have a pot. We’re moving the garden. I need to fix up the yard first. If you’re a parent, you know the feeling. The guilt, plus the 25 open tabs in your brain, and then you walk away.

So then I found myself at last week’s Business of Food summit at Marrow in the Market, listening to a wonderful panel led by my friend and fellow mama Lyndsay Green from the Detroit Free Press. The panel included Patrice Brown, who works in the City of Detroit’s Office of Sustainability. Patrice is also a parent and a farmer. She talked about how much it matters for kids to see where food comes from — not from the grocery store, but from the ground. To play in dirt, to grow things, to understand the planet they’re part of.

I thought about that sad little plant on the windowsill. The box of Uncrustables in my freezer. I felt guilty. Which, by the way, is not how I want you to feel reading this newsletter, and it’s not how Patrice wants you to feel either. We are all doing our best.

The next day, I asked River if he wanted to do some gardening. His face lit up. We were comically unprepared. We grabbed a beach shovel and a mason jar because I couldn’t find a watering can. We used one of the garden boxes we were going to move anyway.

River couldn’t get enough. He kept refilling the mason jar and carrying it back out, calling, “Watch our plant grow, mama!” He is convinced it is a watermelon strawberry plant. And who knows, maybe he’s right.

Then my six-year-old, Desmond, got interested in all the watering that was going on. I asked him if he remembered what ancestors were, like in Moana. He said he did. I told him ours were farmers. That his great-grandma and great-grandpa grew most of what they ate, or bought it from a neighbor in their community. No Target. No Amazon. No grocery store.

Here’s what hit me, standing in the yard with a beach shovel and two muddy kids: We had a moment. They learned something. The whole thing took twenty minutes and a mason jar. The hard part wasn’t doing it. The hard part was the two weeks I spent dreading it.

It wasn’t perfect. That’s why it was perfect.

This newsletter isn’t about holding you to a standard. Real talk: I am barely holding it together. Raising kids right now is hard. It’s about the little things. How to talk to your kids about climate change without making them feel doomed. How to get outside and get them involved even when you have 25 mental tabs open. Things to try, places to go, all kid-tested.

Because small things can be everything. And raising kids with memories of watering the garden, planting saplings, and breathing clean air is how we grow the next people who love this planet enough to take care of it.

Love,

Ashley Woods Branch

Planet Detroit Families Editor

P.S. This Saturday I’ll be joining my colleague Ian Solomon, Planet Detroit’s outdoors reporter, for a community walk through the brand-new Ralph C. Wilson Jr. Centennial Park on the Detroit riverfront. It’s free, all ages, 11 AM. Come say hi. Details below. ↓