Growing Vegetable Soup 1987

We’re ready to work, and our tools are ready, too.

We are planting the seeds, and all the seedlings, and watering them, and waiting for warm sun to make them grow, and grow, and grow into plants.

Lois Ehlert’s childhood was spent playing with offcuts from her father’s workshop and her mother’s home sewing, and her artistic practice evolved from this – this book, her first, was published when she was 53. The plants are observed at ground level, their shoots and tendrils curling from under the artist’s scissors. The young reader can imagine herself crouched in the rows between plantings, watching them grow before her eyes, with the minimal labelling supplementing the text.

Big Bob and Ms May loved this book, and this is the family copy, battered from many readings in the 1990s. We all became up-close-and-personal with zucchini during this time.

I had moved to Ballarat partly because my parents had bought 20 acres half an hour from there. My sisters were independent and had left home, and that left Mum and Dad to pursue their dream of building their own home from scratch. Mum built rock walls from the volcanic stones on the property, a long and loving labour to shelter her extensive garden.  After a lifetime of working in textiles, she began to make her own cloth by handweaving. Dad was a metal worker who could turn his hand to making sheds, gates and the most indestructible compost bin ever. I am a natural brown thumb. Whenever I gave a talk to a parents group, they would present me with a house plant which I’d save from certain death by immediately passing it on to Mum.

I was attracted to the idea of working in an American library. Having spent the previous decade reading everything that ALA produced, I felt it would be a good next step for me. The ideals of programming for families with babies and toddlers, sparked by Dorothy Butler’s Babies Need Books, were espoused in those journals and I was excited to see them in action for myself. I’d travelled to New England and Manhattan on two holidays, and ‘knew’ I’d feel right at home on the east coast. 

I’d read in a journal that the library school at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales compiled a list of people worldwide who wanted to exchange jobs. Today, this would be three clicks:  finding their website, locating and scanning the list, then directly emailing the person. (I’ve just checked Facebook to see if there’s a Page for prospective exchange partners, and there isn’t one I can find.) 

Not so in 1987. I hand-wrote UA a letter and put a stamp on it, shoving it hopefully into a slot marked Overseas Mail at Ballarat Post Office. After a fortnight, I received a stapled photocopied list, arranged alphabetically by country. Just the one line for each person’s dream: their name, library, and the country of exchange they wanted.

I found Donna Matthews on that list. She wanted a 12 month exchange in either Australia or New Zealand, and she worked at a library I’d actually heard of – the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Another couple of months went by as we got to know each other by letter, made a basic agreement to do it… and only then, asked / told our respective bosses.

In Elhert’s words, At last it’s time to eat it all up.