Georgia

No no, I’m not really in Georgia. But anyone who was anywhere near Madison today would nod her or his head sympathetically. It was steamy warm – as you’d imagine the weather might right now in, say, Georgia.

It’s taking a while to sink in that I actually needn’t fly this Thursday morning to campus for an early morning class. I wake up, get up, recoil, go back to bed and doze blissfully into the late morning.

Breakfast – it might as well be brunch. At this late hour it feels so decadent, so incredibly indulgent. And because of Georgia out there, with pouty clouds that now and then release their heavy rains making it that much more steamy, we can eat out on the porch. Bare feet outside, bare anything in fact – arms, legs, you name it. Georgia.

I move from one clump of flowers to the next, feeding, clipping, assessing. That is my day.

And this week we remember our local market! It’s an afternoon affair and that makes it even more leisurely. Don’t need to rush at all, it’s barely starting when we show up after a café break at Paul’s.

Flowers, herbs and beautiful asparagus!

And our favorite bakery, La Baguette, is back this year! Could it be more French? She is making crepes, with nutella or jams or sugars, fresh crepes, spooned carefully onto the crepe maker and if that isn’t reason enough to make your way out here to the Fitchburg market, I don’t know what is.

Ed and I sit back for a while and watch. Warm air, the fragrance of something on the griddle, people moving slowly from one stand to another. Ed nibbles on a pain au chocolat, I occasionally lean over and steal a bite and we continue in this way until it seems too decadent, too overstepping our very loose boundaries of what must be done next.

Ed has an errand and I do as well. His is boring, mine – less so. Three perennials to pick up for the ever expanding beds. I walk between the tables at Johannsen’s Nursery...


 


...remembering when this store first began selling these hardy flowers and remembering, too, how carefully I planned my beds then – height, texture, bloom time – it all mattered. Now the beds are less articulated, less organized.

Back at the farmette, I pick weeds, take pots outside, clip off spent blooms, yes, the usual, until  it’s dinner time. It’ll be asparagus and eggs again, but this time, not out of a hurried indifference to food, but because the asparagus was there at the market, thin and freshly picked that day and eggs are a delicious accompaniment.

After, I take out the nasturtium seeds. You plant them after the danger of frost is past. It’s Georgia! Of course it’s past!

Ed and I work in the garden until there is no more light left. Dusk, made slightly brighter by the faint light of the moon...

Steamy Georgia hours. Slow, perfect and perfectly beautiful.