> jumping into life.

« Home | Spring stretches her languid limbs. She purrs out ... » | New farm. No internet. Busy. Good. » | The river shoulders its banks apart. Rain comes. T... » | Ramps! Oh hell yes. Spring for real. » | A good mouser, and he gets fed in round with the c... » | After the first thunderstorm of the season (of the... » | For the past four days the farm has been ours. All... » | I come in from the barn, hungry for words. They si... » | First peepers and first sunburn of the season. Spr... » | We're changing farms! Check out farmtime for the s... » 

5.24.2008 

Been meaning to write more. Been needing to. Never seems to be time, never know what to say.

Storms today. Sudden flooding storms, rain so loud the radio goes mute in awe. Water down the inside of the walls in sheets, and I run to throw the tarp over our rundown camper home. The light in here now is soft blue, almost institutional feeling, but calming, too.

We've been fighting. Or not quite fighting, just edgy, just walking along each other's edges. Long days even if they're good ones and we come home hungry, tired, been together all day already and no time or space to take a full breath alone. Hard work that frankly neither of us is used to. Wind that comes up out of the north and blows the plastic off the greenhouse, snaps the lines, chills us down to bone. Or no wind and the bugs come up instead, biting hard at all our soft places.

But too we have our hands in the dirt, hard work that we love, bringing plants to life and sending them out into the world. At the end of the day we've done something. We can stand at the top of a field with our hands on our hips and look out over our work, the little sparks of green in a wide soft bed, in a wide cold world, and we put them there, grew them out from seeds, set them safe as we could make them into the soil. In a few weeks or months they'll feed us. The wind comes up and blows the hair out of my eyes, the first spray of rain on my face. I close my eyes.

I'm curled up in my bed in a hotel room on Broadway in Times Square reading your site (and Jeremy's) and catching up on your farm adventures. With unbelievably few words you pull me into the emotions of what you touch and taste and feel on the farm, and I thank you for this gift of you to the rest of us. I know you are busy and tired and have little access to the Internet, but you continue to manage to save us some wonderful morsels. It's quite lovely....

It's hard, working together, doing new difficult things, working so hard that you're tired all the time. I know. Hang in there and let the earth feed you as much as it can.

Post a Comment