Findings

We’re going away for a few days, so I won’t be blogging. This means I’ll miss Poetry Friday as well as Cloudscome’s Garden Stroll on Sunday. Since I’ve come to really enjoy taking part in both of these, I thought I’d do a post combining this week’s gardening with a poem by the most eloquent of gardeners, Wendell Berry.

I can’t get over how satisfying it is to see the vegetables growing — even though I don’t EVER have cravings for vegetables. A few weeks ago, this is what the garden looked like:

Compare that to this week’s view:

We’re enjoying the harvest of lettuce, washed here by my two enthusiastic helpers:

Wendell Berry’s “The Man Born to Farming” captures some of the wonder of watching a garden take off on its own. The title suggests that it’s about the farmer, but really all he does is offer himself; the growing process takes over and does the rest:

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug…
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

You can read this short poem in its entirety here (along with a few others). Of course he’s many times better at gardening than I am, but I have just a taste of what he’s feeling.

Our other major project has been to replace the stones that edge my flower garden beside the garage. Here it is a few weeks ago in its tumbledown state:

My parents-in-law offered us some large stones, and brought them over yesterday. In my zeal, I started right in hauling off the old rocks without waiting for my husband to come home from work. After all, as I mentioned before, I have two enthusiastic helpers! I didn’t make them do it, but I couldn’t hold them off from trying:

(Note the stuffed horse in the shoulder pouch!)

Then I hauled over the new rocks, using the hand truck they left. End result:

Want a closer look at that hosta?

I feel a little like Jack and the beanstalk with it… It just keeps growing.

All that’s left in the trailer is this pair of monstrous boulders. I’m leaving them for my husband. Seems like Wild At Heart said something about men needing a beauty to rescue and an adventure to live. He can kill both birds with one stone here — I mean, uh, two:

Me, I cuddled up for a good long time last night with an aching back and this.

It’s an electric back massager. I know, I know — a back rub is more romantic. But I was looking more for relief than romance! I think I’ll be able to move again today, at least enough to pack for our trip! Have a great week.

This morning at breakfast, my 7-year-old and I discussed the blue jay, that despicable cannibal of baby birds, and how glad we were to see the adolescent cardinals and robins that had eluded his wicked schemes:

Me (in an inexplicably perverse mood): But you know, we eat baby birds, too. Daddy has one every morning, and you’re about to cook one for yourself.

Her (looking alarmed): Eggs!

Me: (sagacious nod)

Her (sighing in relief): But they’re not formed yet.

Me: No. They haven’t hatched yet, have they?

Her: The hen and the rooster haven’t walked around and around the egg yet. That’s how it happens. The hen and the rooster are in charge of starting the creation.

*Disclaimer: when asked, she said she’d obtained this information last year in kindergarten.

I thought I wouldn’t do the Garden Stroll at A Wrung Sponge this week, but I can’t help myself. I’m like a proud parent whipping out my wallet and showing people pictures of my children (yawn).

Speaking of children and gardens… I remember when I discovered I was pregnant with my oldest daughter. She was already 8 weeks old. I had that eerie realization that my body had been taken over by processes beyond my control, and it knew what to do. (I didn’t.)

Same with the garden. It knows what to do. Throw a few seeds in the ground, and the cukes go from this:

to this:

in a week!

Ignore the weeds for a few days in the quite noble cause of being more laid back, and the cucumbers take over, and start strangling them:

(You can click on it to enlarge it.)

Look the other way, and first fruits and flowers appear:

I’m a very small player in the success or failure of this enterprise. Sun, soil, and seeds have minds of their own — a good thing, when you know as little about it all as I do.

Sadly, I was also struck this week by the fact that vegetables are a very small part of my diet. (Has anyone tried growing cocoa beans in the northern U.S.? Or sugar? Or coffee?) I’m going to have to learn how to enjoy them more, and fast. (I kind of thought it would kick in at the sight of homegrown veggies, but… no.)

Meantime, there are lovely things around that one doesn’t have to eat:

Head over to a wrung sponge for a look at some more gardens, or to share some photos of your own!

This will be the best 3 minutes and 23 seconds of your day. It’s the story of an adoption. I heard it on the radio last Friday on my way to the chiropractor, and it made me into a serious driving hazard — DWC (Driving While Crying). (It reminded me of this segment a few years ago: different stretch of road, but similar subject, and similar power.)

This is how God loves.

Here’s the view this week, after some serious rain and another weeding:

And here are a few closer looks. The peppers are coming along nicely:

And the carrots, depending on your vantage point, may be doing well too:

Apparently Mr. Chipmunk thought so, because he’s made a splendid meal out of precisely half of them (so far he’s eluded the surveillance video, but I have eyewitnesses):

But the cucumbers are flourishing:

As is the lettuce:

The peas remind me (for some reason) of Martians, but they’re beginning to flower:

And we have our first few cherry tomatoes:

Blurry, huh? I’m still figuring out my camera, as you can see from this photo of Mr. Munch, who let me get much closer this week:

I have no idea why the flash didn’t go off, but I thought the effect was kind of interesting anyway.

This week I wrote about living on the Marcellus Shale for Poetry Friday, and the local discussions about extracting natural gas. Our oil dependency in general is troubling, but it’s truly a helpless feeling to be conservation-minded and have no control over how the resources are extracted right in your own back yard. The property lines drawn on the surface have little meaning when we’re considering the effects of methods used to reach resources underground. I’m not anti-natural gas, but there are intelligent ways to extract it that leave the land productive and respect its inhabitants. I wish I felt more confident that a forbearing intelligence would be guiding the process.

I can’t control the mining industry, but I can grow a garden. I can produce some of my own food, and work with my own hands to take care of a small patch of dirt in a way that enriches it rather than depletes it. It combats the powerless feeling I have reading the paper sometimes. 

If you want to take a look at some other gardens, or share a post about your own, pop on over to Cloudscome’s Sunday Garden Stroll.

I’ve wanted to participate in Cloudscome’s Sunday Garden Stroll for awhile now, but I wasn’t sure my garden was going to amount to anything. We’ve planted tomatoes, cucumbers, red and green peppers, lettuce, peas, and carrots. This week my daughters and I waited anxiously for the heat wave to break, because weeds were getting the upper hand:

Then a string of thunderstorms brought the temperature down about 17 degrees in an hour, and we knew the next morning would be our chance to transform our small patch into this:

It doesn’t look that impressive, does it? I planted things in phases, and some of it hasn’t sprouted yet. My two daughters (4 and 7) worked with me, and the most enjoyable part was visiting as we crouched and groaned our way along. I played the part of the serious garden geek, talking enthusiastically about how much fun weeding is, and how good it felt to have cooler weather, and how easily the weeds came up, and how great it felt to be reserving all the water in the soil for the vegetables… and I discovered that I AM a serious garden geek. I meant every word of it.

The girls enjoyed getting dirty. It struck me how little opportunity they have to get legitimately, satisfyingly, deeply dirty.

Then we moved to the flower garden beside the garage for dessert. It’s shady and cool, and it didn’t have as many weeds thanks to the leaf mulch. The flower patch represents my mother-in-law’s touch. She’s constantly giving us art projects:

and driftwood:

And some of the original plants, including this enormous hosta:

I realize that in most sci-fi movies, it’s insects who take over the earth… but I’m keeping a wary eye on this hosta.

It felt good to get the ground back in shape and see that the first phase of planting is producing. Now we’ll be able to eat our salads without regard to the global food industry and its various bacterial ills.

That is, provided we can stay a step ahead of this guy:

I love my early morning walks. There’s something about being out alone under the moon before the sun exposes everything, something about not being required to talk, something unbroken that prepares me for the long string of interruptions that will comprise the day.

Here’s Billy Collins’s “Silence”:

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.
 
The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

You can read the rest here. Cloudscome at a wrung sponge is hosting the Poetry Friday roundup today. 

• Saddle blanket: piece of discarded felt that’s been hoarded
• Green belt: piece of discarded elastic
• Blue belt: deflated balloon
• White thingie on back: saved piece of a broken clay creation
• On head: flower petal tied on with discarded yarn
• On ears: mouthpiece of a popped balloon

Now you see why I’ve started washing and saving recyclable materials for this daughter to re-use — milk jugs, egg cartons, veggie trays, etc. Some day, this child is going to be a great inventor! For now, I’ll be happy if I can get her to clean her room (sigh…).

I’ve scheduled my foot surgery for the beginning of August, and in so doing, have determined that instead of going away for the weekend on my 10th anniversary, or spending some time in the mountains with my family, or starting homeschooling ahead of Labor Day to get the jump on things, I’ll be recuperating and learning about non-weight-bearing life with two young children. Since I’m scared, I’m pondering modern medicine…

First: Is there any other option? The podiatrist would say no. I have a bone spur that will break off before much longer. But “much longer” is a flexible matter… I just became aware of the spur, and haven’t observed how fast it’s growing at all.

Also, what does it do to the rest of me, changing my “foundation” like this? The doctor assures me he’s never seen anyone develop a problem caused by the surgery, “but it might aggravate conditions already existing.” Getting one foot done necessitates getting the other one done fairly soon, or I’ll be lopsided. There’s no going back. The podiatrist read my feet like a familiar book, and I believe he diagnosed the problem accurately. But when it comes to how it interacts with the rest of my body, he’s politely uninterested — except to say, hinting darkly at the consequences of NOT having the surgery, that it may be saving knee and hip replacement later.

Specialized medicine leaves us with this feeling of operating in the dark. When I got my teeth straightened, I went into the orthodontist thinking I merely had crooked teeth. He showed me in detail that in fact my entire head was royally screwed up, explaining the physics at work in my bite. When I went to see a chiropractor a few years ago about a pain in my shoulder, he explained how my hip and spine and the base of my neck were similarly messed up. Now the podiatrist is telling me, equally convincingly, that my feet are problematic. It starts to appear that I should have been sent back to the factory at birth for a major overhaul!

What’s the operative definition of health here? A perfectly aligned body, I suppose. I may have no argument with that. But the podiatrist spoke of joint replacement as an inevitability if certain things happen. What did people do in the many centuries before joint replacement? x-ray? or even proper nutrition and glucosamine supplements?

I’m not advocating refusal of any medical intervention, or returning to the Stone Age. But I’m not sure where I come down on all this. We live (in my worldview) in a fallen world, but it’s still the handiwork of a loving Creator who pronounced it good. How does this fit into decisions about how to alter my body? How does modern medicine reflect wisdom, and not merely the division of knowledge — as Thoreau said, “the mind is a cleaver.” Our bodies on the other hand are a whole set of interrelated systems.

I said I don’t advocate a return to the Stone Age, but I can’t help but think of the Nature program I watched over the weekend. It was hosted by Julia Roberts, who explored the lives of a family of Mongolian nomads and their horses. It was thought provoking to observe this culture in which cooperation and resourcefulness and strength are required for survival in a world where the symbiotic relationship between man and nature hasn’t been disguised by convenience. It was a tremendously difficult, but tremendously joyful and vital, life. What do they do when someone has trouble walking? Or gets very sick? Or simply ages and becomes arthritic? It seemed they had a working concept of health and community that could absorb more of the burden… One of them had cerebral palsy and was simply included and cared for, for instance.

Is there an alternative concept of health that doesn’t depend on the eradication of pain or disymmetry? (And… Is ”disymmetry” a word?)

Does any of this have any bearing on the practical and selfish question at hand? Probably not. Should I wait to have the surgery — wait till I don’t have to be quite so mobile — until things feel more stable than they do right now in relation to my husband’s business and the rising costs of living — until we’ve had a chance to observe the development of these spurs — ? Or do I seize the moment as a godsend, a window of insight that marks the end of my body’s ability to compensate for high arches etc., that will save much more discomfort and expense down the road? It’s hard not to see that as the sensible alternative — however many questions may be raised.

For anyone looking for a more developed critique of medical culture (rather than my personal ramblings), I recommend the essays of Wendell Berry’s Life Is a Miracle, or his fictional The Memory of Old Jack or Fidelity.

Today I learned that I need some rather extensive foot surgery on both feet. I have hard bumps developing on the inside/top of each foot near the big toe. Turns out they’re bone spurs that need to be removed to restore movement to my toe, correct the basic structure of my feet, and screw it into place. Another reason to regret the years of running. Very common for runners, I’m told.

I’m thankful if this foundational problem can be repaired. But I can’t quite imagine how to work in the two weeks of non-weight-bearing life, and the ensuing month of flat surgical shoes and taking it slow and easy. I have young kids. I just can’t quite figure how it’s all going to work.

The problem is the timing, certainly not my kids. Especially after watching the movie Children of Men tonight. (Spoiler alert.) What would the world at large — or my own world — look like without children? The one in this movie is a dark, dirty, chaotic world of humans that have lost their ability to reproduce, and all that children add – until. Into a slum in a state of war, a long-awaited child arrives, freighted with the hopes and dreams of the human race, and a path is carved for the child through great danger.

Sound familiar?