“I think these potatoes are bad,” we concluded while preparing dinner at our just-opened Emmaus House kitchen in 1996. Dick Shirey had brought us a donation: a large box of potatoes from Roxbury Biodynamic Farm. But when we cut into the first potato, we noticed the inside was blue. Same with the second and third tater. It wasn’t until we spoke with Dick later that we found out that these were organic blue potatoes. For the next two weeks we enjoyed mashed blue potatoes, blue home fries, and blue potato pancakes.
Twenty-four years later, Dick continues to support our Catholic Worker ministry at Emmaus House. Dick brings his gentleness, wisdom and Roxbury farming skills to our Emmaus House gardens – building raised beds, pulling up weeds, and planting, harvesting, and delivering produce to families we support. Three large sidewalk squares, overgrown with weeds and trash are now flourishing with flowers.
Most of the vegetables we grow started from seed at Roxbury Farm. Many of Roxbury’s trays of seedlings have been distributed to community gardens throughout our South End neighborhood. As an Ignatian Volunteer, Dick is helping to document this special rural-urban relationship among the Albany Catholic Worker, Roxbury Farm and gardens in the city of Albany. Some of this history will be shared through a forthcoming Albany Catholic Worker website, thanks to Eileen Shirey (she and Dick share a last name – might they know each other?) In Cistercian Monastic Life, Jean-Marie Howe writes that we must allow ourselves to be plowed so that our earth becomes softer. “This plowing is kenosis [emptying, the death which must precede new life] and kenosis is not easy. In the measure that our being becomes porous, open, grace can penetrate us.”
After a couple of hours of working in the garden, we sit with Dick and pray together. This passage of Howe’s struck us, for both its gardening metaphor and its insight. As we become more porous, we open ourselves up to the divine dwelling in our neighbors, strangers, and in the random blue potato.
Diana Conroy and Fred Boehrer
July 27,2020
Albany Catholic Worker 
Nostalgic, I am so pleased to find myself navigating Emmaus Catholic Worker House @ Albany website. I was not my transatlantic home has since developed this much. Well done. I missed reading your newsletters. Thank you!
Hello Mpume. I am so happy to see that you found our website! I just today the newsletter which contains your Letter for South Africa. I hope you enjoy reading it online. Diana and I must now work together to have every Catholic Worker friend be notified of the online newsletter! Eileen Shirey
Indeed, Eileen. I was so excited to read my contribution in the Emmaus House newsletter. It just gives me so much joy to keep connected with the family that has become our second family. How we miss them and all friends of Emmaus House. My son and I are always amazed that our association has grown so strong even beyond our physical presence. Our meeting is a beautiful story almost twenty years later. My son turns 28 on Wednesday (21 April) and I cannot believe he turned 10 in 2003 while we were in Albany and it was one of the birthdays he will always remember; when he had a ice cream birthday cake for the first time; courtesy of Diana and Fred.
Love and peace to you all