the world anew
Things have been so busy lately. Too tired to think about all that. Would rather think of spring. And flowers. And short sentences. What is spring looking like around here?
The sap buckets, which had been hanging on hundreds of trees all over the Farm, are mostly gone. The only indicators these buckets were once here are the holes that are visible upon closer inspection of said trees. Grass is green and trees are budding. Birds are loud. The snow drops of March are gone. Daffodils reign in mustard yellow, muted yellows and yellow white mixes. Around our house irises have sprouted but are headless and void of anything which would indicate that these will soon be beautiful flowers.
TSO was outside planting gladiolus and moving plants around the other day. I followed with triteleia bulbs (which I'd never heard of before this year) and weeding fingers. The ground was wonderfully, skin-numbingly cold; it felt good to again look down at my dirty hands and filthy finger nails. As one of the other farmers was saying the other night, "It just makes you feel good. You put something in the ground, it grows and you can pick it."
Inside our vegetable garden has already grown...all over our table. Well, not really a garden yet, just seed cell planters on half the table: TSO's mysteries; my Roma and Italian heirloom tomatoes, delphiniums, green onions and red pepppers. I felt encouraged when I sat down with my calendar to guestimate when things will be planted outside in our garden plot, and when I might be ambitious enough to start second batches of these early seeds for continued picking throughout the summer. I have big dreams for this years veggies: canning beets again; doubling last years' amount of cucumbers for more pickles; finding recipes for everything from zucchini pickles to pickled grapes. I may be getting ahead of myself, but I am ready to again walk barefoot between the perfectly tilled rows of the garden; to smell the rich dirt; to have perpetually stained fingers.
As always, Uncle Walt knows exactly what I feel:
"To the Garden the world"
To the garden the world anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for
reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.
~ Walt Whitman
The sap buckets, which had been hanging on hundreds of trees all over the Farm, are mostly gone. The only indicators these buckets were once here are the holes that are visible upon closer inspection of said trees. Grass is green and trees are budding. Birds are loud. The snow drops of March are gone. Daffodils reign in mustard yellow, muted yellows and yellow white mixes. Around our house irises have sprouted but are headless and void of anything which would indicate that these will soon be beautiful flowers.
TSO was outside planting gladiolus and moving plants around the other day. I followed with triteleia bulbs (which I'd never heard of before this year) and weeding fingers. The ground was wonderfully, skin-numbingly cold; it felt good to again look down at my dirty hands and filthy finger nails. As one of the other farmers was saying the other night, "It just makes you feel good. You put something in the ground, it grows and you can pick it."
Inside our vegetable garden has already grown...all over our table. Well, not really a garden yet, just seed cell planters on half the table: TSO's mysteries; my Roma and Italian heirloom tomatoes, delphiniums, green onions and red pepppers. I felt encouraged when I sat down with my calendar to guestimate when things will be planted outside in our garden plot, and when I might be ambitious enough to start second batches of these early seeds for continued picking throughout the summer. I have big dreams for this years veggies: canning beets again; doubling last years' amount of cucumbers for more pickles; finding recipes for everything from zucchini pickles to pickled grapes. I may be getting ahead of myself, but I am ready to again walk barefoot between the perfectly tilled rows of the garden; to smell the rich dirt; to have perpetually stained fingers.
As always, Uncle Walt knows exactly what I feel:
"To the Garden the world"
To the garden the world anew ascending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love, the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep having brought me again,
Amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through them, for
reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just the same.
~ Walt Whitman
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