A Letter to Ross Gay
March 22, 2024
Dear Ross,
I heard you speak for the first time when I was working in my garden in March of 2020, listening to the On Being podcast that was a rerun of your 2019 interview. I did not know about your work. But as the interview progressed I felt for the first time in months that I was listening to someone who was asking the questions that were duking it out in my own head and offering a way to be in this world that I desperately needed.
What turned me into a devotee of your work though, was the excerpt from The Book of Delights that you read in the very end.
Is sorrow the true wild?
And if it is — and if we join them — your wild to mine — what’s that?
For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.
What if we joined our sorrows, I’m saying.
I’m saying: What if that is joy?
I sat myself down on the ground and cried a good cry at those lines. They still make me weep today. Because in them I found a path forward. And I have somehow stayed upright and on that path ever since. This idea that joy and sorrow could coexist, in fact - rely on one another to exist - helped me make peace with the tumult in my heart.
Let me explain. On November 2, 2019 my 8-year-old son Oli died suddenly of an autoimmune disease we had no idea he had. My optimistic view of life was obliterated that day. My husband retreated into a deep and abiding depression. But my surviving son, Leal, who was 11 at the time, needed a parent to help him through the trauma and loss. He and I limped along through the early months thanks to the support of our community and constant visits from friends and family. But then COVID shut that all down and Leal, who had found refuge in friends in the absence of his brother, was suddenly left with just two very damaged parents as the entirety of his in-person human contact.
Instinctively, Leal and I turned to the garden. It had always been the boys' favorite place. And we had the idea of expanding it and growing food we could share with the neighborhood. It was just a seed of an idea. It was mostly something to do. But then I started reading your books and learned about the Bloomington Orchard and our project designed for distraction took on new meaning. By mid-summer, we had grown enough to put out a modest farmstand in the front yard offering free food to anyone who happened by. We named the stand “L & O Farms” in honor of both boys. For the first few months when COVID was still so new we never interacted with the people who came to the stand but every gnarly potato and sprig of rosemary would be gone by midday and little notes of love, little recipes, bundles of baked goods, recycled jars of wildflowers, would find their way to our porch. In time we realized engaging outdoors was pretty safe and in exchange for vegetables, we started to get stories. Most people knew we were the house where the kid died, but when we also became the house with the farm stand it was like a portal opened to sharing sorrows - to creating joy.
The stand still goes up today and sometimes it’s a little like the glorious party in the opening to Inciting Joy. We get deep real fast with the folks who linger. And I too have found that: “everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything — lives with some profound personal sorrow.” Knowing this is medicine because when I feel overwhelmed by my own sorrows I close my eyes and can feel the mycelium network that runs from my garden through all the neighborhood streets connecting me to a web of people who have also loved and lost, who are also trying to keep growing. It helps. It makes me want to keep growing too.
That first summer my sister sent me 5 bean seeds she’d gotten from a seed exchange. Early on I lost the yellow envelope they came in which named them and noted their small size and mighty flavor. In the first year, those 5 mystery seeds produced 5 prolific climbing vines that gave visitors to the farm stand baskets of beans all summer long. We saved seeds in the fall and the next year grew a 20-foot row of these beans. Once again they produced in abundance. And each year we find more space to grow them because they are so popular and the seeds save so well. I am always humbled by their generosity. Those first 5 seeds have now been shared with family and friends across the country. Because I cannot find their original name we’ve dubbed them Oli’s Magic Beans - a nod to the fact he loved nothing more than to eat green beans fresh off the vine. I’m sharing a bag with you because you were there, in my ear, when I planted the great-great-great-great grandparents of these seeds. You were with me the first time I picked one and ate it and said, in my best Ross Gay voice: “Delight!”
Each spring I listen to the Book of Delights because it connects me back to that first year when your words and your voice were a balm for my loneliness; a guide for how to live in a world that often breaks my heart. I am so very thankful that you exist on this planet and that you continue to share the contents of your heart and head through your art. What a gift that has been. Oli’s Magic Beans are no match for the magnitude of my appreciation, but I’m telling you… fresh off the vine when they’re just about three inches long, warmed by the July sun - at least they’ll make your toes curl.
In gratitude,
Jenna Fournel
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