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