The Devil's Snare

Specks to Giants

I guess I should take a moment to answer that question, how did this small town Canadian girl, plain old Jemma Lemieux, get front row seats to a Bolivian jungle execution?

In a lot of ways, it started with my grandparents. 

They owned a farm that was on its way out by the time I arrived on this earth. Death by a thousand factory farm cuts. But when I was a kid, I had no idea it was on life support. It was my happy place. A short drive from our town, I'd go there weekends and help my grandparents sow seeds and harvest produce. I loved it.

Maybe you're not into gardening like moi (what's having a life like?) but to me growing a plant is the closest thing to magic.

Take a tomato plant. You start in the spring with this tiny, tiny seed... like we're talking fractions of an inch. And you put it in the ground and in a couple of weeks that fraction of an inch has turned into an inch tall seedling that will grow and grow and by the fall if you don't prune it that plant can be 7 or 8 feet tall and producing 30 pounds of tomatoes. All from not much more than a speck of a seed.

I think my love for something so small blossoming into something so powerful comes from being a late bloomer myself. My four foot whatever pre-teen self was the last girl in my class to hit that puberty growth spurt and the last one to need the services of a bra (I'm 5'5 now and quite respectable in other measurements too, thank you very much).

Gardening was like wish fulfillment. I'd turn the specks into giants.

I wanted to understand plants. But even more so, I wanted to understand people's connection to the plants. I felt like the little kid amongst a classroom of young women, but what is everyone else's story? 

That's how I became an ethnobotanist which as job titles go, kinda clunky. It means I am "an expert" (quotes 'cause like, is anyone really an expert in anything? You always have a blind spot to fill) in studying how a particular people interact with their native plants. My fellow ethnobotanists (I'm sorry, that name is never gonna sound cool) are out there tracking climate change or trying to solve food insecurity, some are attempting to preserve the biodiversity of our planet, and then there are the ones like me. The ones trying to find the next medical breakthrough. 

But that still doesn't explain why I am here, with an AK-40-whatever cocked and pointed at my suddenly very delicate feeling  head.

The truth is, I was supposed to be bundled in a goose down jacket looking for a miracle moss in Scandinavia right now until Nick Redding broke up with me not in my apartment or at a coffee shop or in line to buy groceries. No, Nick fucking Redding chose to break up with me in my happy place. My little patch of the 6th Street Community Garden in Brooklyn, New York.

When I moved to New York it wasn't easy getting a plot of land to grow anything, and my shoebox of a twelfth floor walk-up in Brooklyn wasn't exactly sunny and spacious for one human, let alone plant.

But after a couple of years I finally got a little plot to call my own at the 6th Street garden. In a little clearing surrounded by bridge and brick, I would spend summers as a grad student growing tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers, peppers, spinach, and one ill-advised foray into ground cherries (things are like weeds, but if you like bitter tasting berries, go nuts!).

When I got a job after graduation, with some help from some of the other gardeners, I was able to keep my garden going despite the demands of travel. It was the one thing I was excited to come home to check on. Were they blooming? How tall did they get in my absence. I was like Belle in a library. I was home. And then Nick chose to break up with me there.

If he was telling you this story, which, oh my god, consider yourself lucky he is not, he'd tell you he was so wrecked with guilt for cheating on me when I was in Thailand that he just had to tell me. He couldn't live with it any longer. Sure, okay? But how is that my problem. He gets literally fucked so I then get emotionally fucked in my little oasis?