A few days ago, I planted fall and winter crops – arugula, spinach, lettuce, kale, chard – as I've done most Augusts for the last 15 or so years. Spinach was the first vegetable I learned to grow. It's been a good teacher: how to endure the winter, keeping its head up through the cold. As Kermit knows, some days, it isn't easy being green.

Honestly, I don't much like the taste. I mostly grow spinach for my family, especially our kids. Somehow, in the midst of chaotic, uncertain life, if they could just eat spinach from our garden, things would be ok.

I know, I know. It's specious reasoning, Popeye superstition.

But you try parenting in the 21st century and tell me if you don't grab hold of a few superstitions, too.

"It's grown with love," I would always tell them.

Grown with love? Eyerolls.

I don't care. They need to hear it. Or, at least, I need them to hear it.

The more I talk with our local farmers, the more I realize: it's all generosity. It's all grown with love. You don't toil over fields for 16 hours a day without depositing some element of care and concern into the food you are producing. It's right there, among the vitamins and nutrients: love. Next to spinach, I also planted arugula, but damn, I can barely see the seeds. They are unbelievably small, and sowing them, my heart wonders:

How does something this small become so large?

Earlier this week, as I bent over the arugula rows, another question followed, like some spooked animal poking its head around the barn door:

Who will feed my son now?

Yesterday, we loaded up the truck, moved him a few hours away into a college dorm room. He hoisted up the bed into loft-level, laughed with his new roommate, arranged his guitars.

It was the first time in 19 years he'd be living under someone else's roof.

The day felt like a Cat Stevens song. A spinning, swirling ribbon of emotions, tripping up my feet as I carried the mini-fridge. We dragged it out, stretching the day as long as it would go before saying the best goodbyes we could.

All day, I searched the campus, but couldn't find any sort of garden.

Is anyone growing spinach here?

If so, is it grown with love?

In 19 years, we've eaten more meals together than anything else. In comparison, there is no other activity worth counting. We've fished many waters, gone to concerts, movies and games, but it is dinner – the evening meal – that is most abundant and numerous.

There was the time he created his own hot dog eating contest. (No one else entered.) Our little Joey Chestnut, four years old. We bought $50 worth of Good Dog, his stomach grew like a zeppelin. Three, four dogs, into the fifth.

There was the first time he harvested his own dinner, cleaning trout he'd caught.

His first Lookouts game; so excited, we said yes to it all: soft serve in the little plastic baseball hats, pretzel, red Slushee. We didn't make the fifth inning before he threw up in the breezeway. I sopped it with those thin papery napkins, needing about 1000 to do the job.

There have been meals we laughed so hard, it came out through our noses.

He'd make pastries for Mother's Day, and later, his own pasta. Now, nearing 20, he burns through calories like a small Vesuvius, eating more eggs than Gaston.

This summer, he took a road trip, solo. Sixteen states, seven thousand miles.

On the edge of the world, he read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

This, from Frankl, a man who survived the Holocaust:

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

It has been a two-way street, one I could only travel as a parent. Whatever measure of love we doled out, we got more of it in return. Our kids can't understand this – not yet – but they have become our actualizers, their work as children making us more ourselves. We have grown up – actualizing, in Frankl's words – by raising them and, in return, they have raised us.

Let me say it easier: we love them like a fire you can never put out. Leaving campus yesterday, it felt – still feels – like I had misplaced my right leg, left arm, half my heart, somewhere. Like you pat your pants for your wallet, but it's somewhere else, and this wallet is full of treasure.

All you parents ahead of us – whose children already moved out – have already said similar things. Kids going off to college? Like being kicked by a mule. Like the roof on your house suddenly is gone.

It is all letting go.

These last few years, a shift – natural, good, grounded – has been occurring. Some nights, the spinach goes uneaten on the plate.

I realized: he doesn't need us any longer.

He can feed himself.

And he will meet others – partners, friends, mentors – who will also offer food of all kinds: backyard lite-beer-laughter over the grill, a tender touch and caress, the wisdom of someone who knows how to listen, the strong wall of a good friend's heart, the embrace of in-laws he has yet to meet.

It is time he eats from someone else's table.

It's time he builds his own.

All these places we've gone together ... all the waters we fished ...

The four-legged friends we've made ...

The beauty we've witnessed and beheld ...

The risks we – really, you – took ...

It was all food.

All designed to nourish.

To grow.

To build up.

All of it, grown with love.

My son, you will build such a magnificently, spectacularly, ridiculously good life.

You are strong in ways I never was.

Just promise us one thing.

My God, enjoy it. Savor it.

It is the most precious, exquisite and gorgeous of foods.

Prepared with such beauty and grace, all of it, grown with love.

All photography by Sarah Unger (sarah@foodasaverb.com)

All design by Alex DeHart

All words by David Cook (david@foodasaverb.com)

Story ideas, questions, feedback? Interested in sponsorship or advertising opportunities? Email us: david@foodasaverb.com and sarah@foodasaverb.com

This story is 100% human generated; no AI chatbot was used in the creation of this content.