I bit one of the chocolate eggs in half and stuck the other half in her mouth. Her eyes got wide and she splashed and squealed. A minute later the little hand came back with, “num-num?”.

“No more baby girl, is it time to get out?”

She plopped abruptly back down in water and shook her head very seriously, “No!…Momma? Momma?”

She asks for her momma a lot. Bath time always brings up the topic of her missing parent. She has not let Kaety take the momma role. It’s usually Kaety who is the primary safe harbor for our little fosters. For a lot of these kids men are source violence and fear – so I’m used to being viewed with suspicion and held at a distance. In this case though I am the bomb! She is all daddy all the time.

She reached out again and patted my face. I grabbed her hand, kissed it and pulled the towel down off the rack, “Time to get out!” She laughed at the kisses and hung on to me as I wrapped her up in the towel. She looked at me again and asked, “Momma?”.

I carried her in to get jammies on and answered her, “Momma’s not here right now baby”.

I wrestled her into her jammies and laid her down in the crib. She patted the side of her face – her way of asking that I rub her head. I turned off the light and rubbed her head while she settled down.

I whispered “goodnight” as I closed the door and thought, “Come on momma- pull it together, your baby wants you.”

In the middle of a deep patch he turned off the mower and yelled up at me, “Do you think it would help your campaign if everyone knew that their next Lincoln County Commissioner liked to do her own yard work?”

I smiled, “It would help, but honesty demands that I admit that I hate mowing – that’s your job.”

He smiled and laughed and I turned my attention to the winter beets. They were beautiful, enormous, and ready to harvest. As I pulled them the smell of the earth mixed with with the fresh mown grass was intoxicating.

A garden is important to me. As a little girl I enjoyed working with my dad in our huge family garden. His love for working with the earth and harvesting food has followed me into my adulthood and is something I now share with my children.

Noble, our 3 year old helped me load the beet bounty into baskets. The abundance we had just pulled out of our family garden was stunning. I noticed another little set of hands reaching for the beet and was struck by a crash of contrasts. We’ve been fostering a little 16-month old girl for the last few weeks. She came to us with a lot of food security issues and had obviously suffered from a significant level of neglect. I’m guessing she had never seen a beet, or worked in the garden with her family, or smelled the fresh dirt. The deep connection I felt to the earth through working in the garden was something that she hadn’t experience until now. I was grateful that in the short time she’d be with our family that she’d know these things and more critically know the deep sense of well-being that comes from a constant source of healthy food.

When I looked at her little hands wrapped around a beet almost bigger than she was I thought about statistics that have burned themselves into my head – all the children and families in Lincoln County that struggle with poverty, food security and addiction. I ‘do something’ by about those issues by bringing a child into my home and loving and feeding them. As County Commissioner I want to reach into these critical issues and do even more.

My husband and I have a very close relationship. He saw me with the babies and the beets and seemed to know what I was thinking. He came up behind me, kissed me on the head and said quietly, “Do you think it would help your campaign if everyone knew how badly their next County Commissioner wanted every child in the county to have enough food to eat?”