inside outside

...or helter skelter. Or rush and release. Or back and forth. Call it what you will, the day had no structure, no consistency, no backbone to it.

Maybe it’s because it started too early. Lanky guys with cigarettes dangling, shows up with the MG&E truck at 7:15, ready to dump wood chips. Weird wood chips. More like pine needles and old moldy branches. But, we’ll take what we can get. The farmette is one big wood chip hill. I found my thrill on blueberry hill, piled with chips from the mill, on that blueberry hill.

Was this one of the earlier farmsteads in the area? I ask Ed at breakfast.

Maybe. It’s on a hill. Farmhouses were built on hills.

Why do you suppose?

Because the soil is better down below? Or, because there’s the view...

Right now, we haven’t much of a view. The trees are too tall.

In fact, I’m not sure our veggie garden is getting enough sunlight. In the winter, it looked like we would have more than six hours on the patch, but things change, trees fill out, shade takes over.

We can move the veggies out by the orchard in the future... Ed comments. But what would we do with this plot of land?

Grow flowers! – I say to him, knowing damn well that it’s the answer he’d like not to hear. Even today, I stopped by the nursery to pick up “oranges and lemons”  and “raspberry truffle.” You sure do like flowers – he shakes his head.

In the afternoon I go back to my school stuff. I have to. And that’s okay – these are good work demands. For a brief hour or two, I meet with dedicated students, at Paul’s. To answer questions about the semester's materials. In biking there and back, I note that the weedy but ever beautiful phlox is up and running.

Funny how sometimes you have to remember what's merely a weed and what's a beautiful flower.

In the evening, Ed takes me out to dinner.  At Sardine, for the happy hour special (oysters at 50%, glasses of wine at 50%, and then we share a plate of mussels).

We don’t let it end there. The sun is nearly set as, after dinner,  we walk along the road, toward the fields adjacent to the south, to the west... Ed talks to Lee, the woman who seems to single handedly cultivate the land here.
Will you be planting our acre? He asks.
It is not an acre. She’s right, it’s less than that. For what? She wants to know the cost involved.

For fruits and vegetables.
How many?
Just for us. She smiles. We shake hands, she drives off.

There is a beautiful sunset as we make our way across fields and marshes, dry now in this early season. I know, a photo would be appropriate. I did take out my phone and to snap one and then another, but they're not worth downloading here...

Not everything needs to be commemorated with a photo.