I came across an Alice Walker quote, and I am guessing it is from Searching For Our Mothers’ Garden: “In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.”

When I moved from a studio apartment in Montreal to my parents' fifty-acre retreat near Markdale, I wanted a garden.

I was not so much interested in the flowers my mother planted at their home as I was in growing food.

In that, I was looking more toward her father. When they moved off the farm and into New Glasgow, he had a ten acre market garden. I think he would have been proud of my first attempt: totally weed free. I was not working many hours when I first moved.

My grandfather would have shaken his head at my later gardens.

Working full time with two kids and a barn full of sheep, the garden did not claim all my attention. I got comfortable with my style of wide rows mulched with hay. Lots of zucchini, a good crop of corn, peas and beans and lettuce. Beets and carrots. Not all the veggies we ate in the summer came from that garden, but a good chunk did.

Likely, he’d cross his arms and tap his foot looking at how I now try to grow veggies in containers and a couple raised beds.

Still, the snow peas are producing and the first crop of spinach is done and about to be replanted. The tomatoes are bushy and flowering. Pole beans are climbing. My mom would love the way the sweet peas are taking off, ready to flower soon. She would shake her head at the cucumber plants mixed into the flower beds.

The Alice Walker quote got me thinking about what I have searched for, and what I have found.

I always thought that I would do some academic writing, and I did publish a couple of articles. But somehow ideas I had made it into sermons not articles. When the itch to write did not go away, I decided to try fiction.

I read mostly fantasy literature, so that seemed the logical place to start. So many fantasy stories are told in semi-medieval settings, I was not going there. I looked for another mythology to ground my work and turned to the stories of Ancient Greece. There I came across Mount Pelion, the home of the centaurs. I found a young girl who met a young centaur.

Their story took me into the Humber College correspondence program in creative writing.

The program pairs the student up with an established author. The student submits chunks of writing and gets feedback. The author I was paired with was excited by my description of the project, and then ripped the first chapter I submitted to shreds.

I had gone looking for feedback, so I kept with it, rewriting the next chapter before sending it in. The author was still pretty critical but not as dismissive.

Over the next eight months, I learned a ton. That story is still on my computer and in my imagination, but I left it for a time and started a different story, one that became my first published novel, Moon Of The Goddess.

Another kind of search. Three times, I had to go looking for a job. Once, we had taken a year sabbatical and twice for unusual circumstances that meant I needed to make a transition.

I had an interview that went well, but I heard that when they attended worship, the chair said, “That is not the person we want.” My reaction was that it was good that they could see that. It had been a really good service. If they did not want what I offered that day, we would not have been a good fit.

Each time, I did find a job that started right when I needed to. I was a bit lucky. And each time the work was a good fit. But I did not just find a job. I found a community. I found a coherent group of people who let me be part of their family for a time.

As she always does, Alice Walker got me thinking. I am going to notice memories of searching and pay attention to what I found. The finding is usually a surprise.

Cathy Hird lives on the traditional territory of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation.

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