Friday, May 11, 2012

cat on a hot steel roof




Hello, morning. Yes, from any vantage point, it is a beautiful time of day. A real show stopper.


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But I cannot dawdle today. I have before me a grand swing through town, with many things to accomplish there.

The best part is the first stop – at the Arboretum, for a walk (a run?) with my daughter.


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The worst part is everything else. When you don’t go in to the city very often, your checklist grows. And grows. Exchange this, pick up that, and that, stop over here, do that. Bleh!

I remember sitting at a café in Sorede (very southern tip of France) and thinking – man, that guy who’s making food deliveries here sure seems to enjoy his work! Going from one place to the next, carting in boxes of onions and carrots with stems still on them – he’s virtually singing as he unloads the truck. What’s so great about stop and go errands? Stop, start, stop, start – it’s numbing!

In the Sorede scene, I see the pleasurable elements: it's not just the unload, it's also the greeting, the pause for an espresso, a comment on this or the next thing, a salute to life.

My errands (after the lovely walk) have the stop and go but none of the warm elements that would give them meaning and vitality. Stop, get out, purchase, pick up, no greeting offered, none received. Onto the next one.


And then, finally, I’m done. Pulling into the driveway of the farmette, I exhale. Home.


In the evening we are out planting again. Tomatoes. Eight more go in, shade, no shade, so what – so they’ll produce a dozen fruits each instead of two dozen. Do the math! We have too many plants, too many seedlings, we should cross our fingers and hope for a small bounty!

And then we plant a flat of strawberries and they look so pretty and so oblivious to the fact that they’ll have to spend half the day in shade that we search the farmland for more berries (because there are indeed some old berries with new runners, smothered in weeds, needing a rescue) and we transplant those too and now we are satisfied because the peas are starting to climb, the lettuce leaves are almost ready, the tomatoes are perky and the strawberries – lovely to behold.


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The bulk of our spring work is done. Orchard, flowers, veggies, berries – most everything is in place. (Except the tomatoes: dozens more of those... next year we’ll do less, Ed tells me, as if that helps us now.) Some of our plantings will thrive, others wont, we know that, we are not foolishly optimistic. But the stage is set. The new season begins.