Cocoon House offers transitional housing for homeless kids and kids booted out of foster care after turning 18. It’s a small organization, but they help a lot of kids finish high school and get some skills so they can make good choices for themselves throughout their lives. (Bet there are similar places near you, if you’re inclined to give them a hand.)

One program revolves around food and gardens. Zach Marl, Cocoon House Nutrition Coordinator, and the residents have four fruit and vegetable beds they tend and harvest. Not only are they eating better, but they’re learning about where food comes from, and how to cook for themselves and others. There are lot of job skills with food prep and cooking that residents can use to get jobs. But they’re also learning what it means to sit down and have a meal they’ve made themselves: how food isboth a necessity and an opportunity to be generous.

Transitional housing for kids booted out of foster care is almost nonexistent except for places like this. These are not young adults who have resources to fall back on to help them rent an apartment, find a job, and learn how to shop and cook and pay their bills. These are small things, but small things are often the difference between making a good choice and making a bad one.

We’re going to donate a worm composter to Cocoon House and possibly another compost bin. I’m not saying this to show how great we are---I’m saying this to show how great Cocoon House is. Gardening and getting your hands in the dirt is a fundamental way to literally connect with a place. To be grounded.

I think that’s important.

In Ryan’s last letter, a 6-pager, he told a hilarious story of how he’s now a trustee and working in the kitchen at the jail. Let’s just say 300 cabbages and a guy named Big Al feature prominently. After washing and chopping the 300 cabbages under Big Al’s---well, I guess yelling is a form of guidance---guidance, he wrote that when he went to clean up after work, he spent two minutes playing with the dirt that had been washed off all the vegetables. He said he knew it was weird, but he couldn’t help but let the mud run through his fingers. (I didn’t think it was that weird for him to do---this was a guy who actually started an orange tree in his cell using wet toilet paper.)

It has been months since Ryan had been outside and he hates it. Dirt, sun, fresh air, and even rain and cold are better than gray walls and steel doors.

I am hoping that touching earth helps him think about what comes next in his life. Not that a handful of earth is the answer, because there are no answers, just as there are no real fixes, just temporary stretches of things working out. That’s the blessing and the burden. The sun will rise in the morning. The weeds will return, which isn’t fair to weeds because they are just plants you didn’t intend. Your back will ache. Your hands will be embedded with dirt. But that is the good and the bad of it: to wonder at it and at what it means and what your place is.

When the first human being stood upright, along with bipedal motion came the ability to plan and to worry; carrying food, tools, or weapons because easier and along with it the need to look ahead. And these are the kinds of choices that a garden and a meal can shape---when to weed, when to harvest, when to cook. Who will you share food with? In passing plates and bowls and cups, will you weave the ties that bind you, knowing what it means to be fed, to be given a place, and to have someone share? Will you be able to do the same? Will you seek out your chance to do the same? Will you make those small choices now so you can be generous later?

I have no idea. I can hope, but then, hope is only hope when you have no reason to have it.

That is much more pessimistic than I really feel. It’s not enough to want people to get a fair shake, but it seems like such a distant goal. At least the kids at Cocoon House are, if not completely, safe, then safer. And that’s something.