People I've Met

I've met some amazing people lately, and oddly enough (given my recent focus on gardening and farming) quite a few of these people happen to work the land. During 80/35 I met a gentleman from the Council Bluffs area who farms and writes fiction. And just last week I met Tim and Tom (no relation). Tom's passion is gardening. He has a regular office job but he also has 4 garden plots throughout Des Moines. He wants to quit his job this fall and travel through the workers on organic farms (WOOFING) program for the next year, working on various farms in exchange for room and board, and eventually hopes to end up in the south to farm in an urban area full time. His dream would be for gardens to grow on the roofs of buildings downtown and residents of the buildings could have their own CSAs. I told him there is no place like Des Moines to start that venture as it is a place that embraces people with ideas--large enough to garner support and small enough to avoid much competition with ideas. We need dreamers. Tom is from North Carolina but has lived elsewhere and traveled the world, preferring always the smaller towns to get a better sense of how people live. He's one of the few people I've met who's hopped a train, which he did at age 14 for a few months. His wants and needs are little, and so he's spent several years working on various farms and earning what he needs to travel. His favorite place in the world is a village in the south of France. He stopped in Des Moines to visit his daughter and grandsons on his way to Las Vegas to scatter the ashes of his grandmother who lived 100 years. But he was surprised with the city--how clean and vibrant and friendly it was--found a few gardening jobs and is hanging out a bit longer. Eventually he'll wind up in Hawaii for the winter to stay with his son on an eco-village where all the food you could ever need grows on the surrounding trees. I'm trying to convince him to write a memoir. I think I've mentioned it in a previous post but I'll say it again--we should never assume the ordinary about the people around us. Everyone has something about them that can fascinate, that can teach, that can entertain, that can inspire. I'm thinking I'll start including a weekly post about the people I meet.