Little Edens: a family military legacy leads this veteran to root herself in agriculture
Words and Images by Jo Arlow
Fall 2019
Content warning: suicide
Laura Marone didn’t grow up on a farm, indeed she didn’t grow up in any one place at all. A self-described transcontinental military brat, Laura bounced between North and South Carolina, Virginia, Illinois, California, Maine, and Hawaii. Even so, her extended family’s vocations gave her ample opportunity to experience the intensity, joy and intimacy of natural spaces: Her maternal great-grandfather’s Illinois farm and its herds of cows. An aunt’s apple orchards and another’s flower nursery where she worked as a young teen. Early years in Maine building forts, hunting fiddleheads, and eating wild blueberries.
“My parents always told stories about me bringing animals home to care for, even red ants in a jar. I was scolded about bringing those ants home and wasn’t so good about keeping them in the jar,” she laughs during our conversation one sunny late fall day last year. When in the Carolinas she’d pick up turtles that had been hit by cars and rehabilitate them. Even indoors she was under the spell of nature, living inside books like “Hatchet,” by Gary Paulsen about a thirteen-year-old boy who is forced to learn to survive on his own after a plane crash in the Northern Canadian bush.
Having now put down roots in Olympia, Washington Laura has realized some of those childhood wild and wooded daydreams. In recent years she has worked as the program manager of Victory Farm--a veteran support program under the long-time community non-profit Garden Raised Bounty (known as GRuB)--and as an urban homesteader. Her work with GRuB grew directly from her experience as a veteran of the US Army and a desire to help other veterans experience the transformational power of nature and farming.
Family military legacy and that curious spirit Laura had as a child carried her to Army basic training when she was in her early twenties and by then a single mother. The ensuing years were not easy on her family, with duty stations in Texas and Korea necessitating separation. But her family routine stabilized when she returned to Fort Hood, Texas, and trained as a military corrections officer. In 2010 change came once more, as she was transferred to duty at Guantanamo Bay. There were blessings of friendships with fellow service members and demanding work. Her duty at Guantanamo came to end after a knee injury, leading to missing not only promotions but participation in the elite Bataan Memorial Death March competition and a sought-after posting in an Afghani women’s assistance program. Eventually, she was medically evacuated from Cuba. “Going overseas and making those relationships was a positive,” she says “But leaving family behind and getting injured was the hardest.” She was eventually stationed in the Pacific Northwest where she moved in with her mother, endured extensive physical rehabilitation, and was given a medical discharge.
Like many coming out of their time in the military, Laura sought a new way of finding community and some renewed peace. She hiked and camped with her dog, learned mushroom foraging, and studied sustainable agriculture law, science, and community food solutions, attending schools in Vermont and Washington State. She discovered new favorite authors--Aldo Leopold, Mark Shepherd, Rachael Carson, and began to ask the big-picture questions: “How are we going to restore our food systems if we are destroying our land? It’s not a new thing to treat the land [with respect], it’s a new name for traditional ways… It’s a way to feel safe, connected with the earth, and to learn…to heal.”
She began to feel like she fit in in these new places.
For Laura, farming became a way to help not only her family but as a means to continue serving the country. GRuB was the perfect fit, a nonprofit focused on helping youth and others develop a sense of agency in growing their own food through building garden beds, farming, and providing garden knowledge and support to people in economic need. “Food security is giving a man a fish but food sovereignty, understanding food systems, where it’s from and how the land is affected and what your role in your own food system is, is key,“ Laura says when thinking about the core of why she is in GRuB. It’s also a “concrete means of creating a sense of connection and hope and compassion. Hope that the sun will shine.”
In addition to GRuB’s main farm property just outside downtown Olympia, there are two satellite farms including the new veteran-run plot sited alongside the Thurston County food bank. Its acreage provides quiet camaraderie for veterans and their families, often those struggling to transition to civilian life. There are garden beds of medicinal flowers and ample produce. Veterans come and pull weeds, harvest, water, and tend or join with community members at the farm’s BBQs and family events. Being involved from the moment of creation of the veterans’ farm has given her the opportunity to be in community with people she likely never would have met. And it’s less structured and pressured work than her previous life, which gives her the space to continue to dream and reflect on where she’s been and what she hopes for her own homestead. “Every person heals from trauma in their own way and growing food can help but that process might be different for every person,” she says. “And that’s true whether you’re a woman or man in the military or in farming. Sometimes I feel like a fraud doing my job because I offer words of hope and assistance and resources when I myself am having some of these same thoughts and struggles. But it helps me too because I’m focused on the farm and so excited by possibilities.”
Both the GRuB farms and her own gardens provide a continuum of places that ground her mind and provide compassion. “I can come out to my gardens at midnight and talk to the moon because neither talk back” she laughs. “ I can sit out here with my feet in the earth and listen to the birds and trees with no expectations but just respecting them and they let me be me.” GRuB has engaged veterans in all areas of agriculture, “And I want my farm to be a part of that eventually,” severing as another space for veterans to get experience and have their own dream.
For now much of her own property is still fallow. Her plan is to let her chickens and other animals use the pasture and continue to improve the soil over time. “It’s been a dream to encourage edible spaces whether gardens or apple trees or blueberries patches,” she says. She wants to turn part of her property into an orchard and designate the trees as living memorials for those whom have been lost. These losses include the recent passing of her beloved mother to a swift moving cancer and her cherished younger brother, a military veteran who died by suicide.
In a large plot nearest her house that she shares with her husband and children is something special; her own “Little Eden” as she calls it, looking out over the abundant vegetation in the waning afternoon sunlight. Raspberry brambles and a grape trellis are original to the property and are flourishing. Several raised beds are a semi-tamed, profusion of color and a cascade of healing and medicinal herbs and flowering plants. They were built alongside members of the GRuB backyard garden program and her family. “My kids really helped [build that garden area] when it was hot our first week on the property. There was a lot of complaining and it was slow work!” The garden can barely contain its long list of inhabitants: huckleberry, currants, yarrow, peonies, elderberry, stinging nettle, mugwort, thyme, oregano, mint, comfrey, borage, poppies, rhubarb, zinnias, cornflowers, and strawberries.
“I do it for the pollinators, the bees,” Laura says. Putting all of this out here for them reminds me of my mother.” The pain of the loss is evident in the quiet of her voice and a downward glance. “Before my mom died this July [2019] I really wanted her to be able to come see [this garden], but she didn’t get make it.” We turn to examine the produce section of the beds. There’s a profusion of sweet peas and asparagus and blueberries amongst tall lupine in it’s summer glory. “The hummingbirds linger here,” she smiles.
Laura takes comfort in the work of farming as it reflects the beauty of time and transition. “There is decay and death but also reflection and gestation. Everything must die but that doesn’t mean it’s the end. It just means it’s a chance for a new beginning, a chance for all of us stuck in decay to find a new beginning. Maybe I’m planting for my mom…making sure it something that if she were to be here she wouldn’t want to leave. And my brother wanted to be a part of this dream too. I just close my eyes and see them and feel them out here. In my mind I talk to them. It’s the only way I can show them how beautiful things are.” And with so much to do and so many to serve she knows it’s worthy. “ I do all of this because if I plant something today then I have to stick around to watch it grow tomorrow. I have to stay.”
Our gratitude to Laura who graciously shared her story with us. Thank you for your service to our nation - twice.
You can find more information about GruB here.