Promises

“July. Last night from one in the morning until four, I sat in the bed of my pickup with a friend and watched meteor showers hot dance over our heads in sprays of little suns that looked like white orchids.”
Gretel Ehrlich
The Solice of Open Spaces

I take advantage of the break in hail and rain showers to cut rows in my garden beds. One by one I plop in small knobby seed potatoes, the amount fitting a potager souvenir rather than a potential pantry filler, and cover them gently. My experience with growing food has not been a wildly victorious succession of overflowing larders, but rather the slow accumulation of gathering experience and perhaps the occasional pleasure of announcing at suppertime that these carrots, those beans, came right out of the back yard thirty minutes ago.

The soil is loamy and soft, and smells like promises. I cut in more rows for onion sets, and lay the spindly greens on their backs in the troughs. Once set upright, they look like the garlic coming up nearby. I wonder what’s coming up at the CSA farm we used to get our produce from during the year, and wish I could drone myself over their fields and get inspired. It used to be a lovely meandering walk down skinny country roads and across mucky fields to their farm, back when we lived in the little cabin. I’d peek into their hoophouses and inhale the thick aroma of plump tomatoes while catching up on all manner of news, or lean against the rough railing while one of the farmers lunged a horse. These were (and still are) real people with real dirt under their nails and astoundingly intelligent in all manner of history, literature, and vocabulary. My brain couldn’t keep up (nor comprehend the books they loaned me), but they were friendly and the kind of folks you’d want to crowd in with on a blustery wet evening by an open fire with a hot mug of probably some sort of from-the-land root infusion and listen to hours of poetry written by the mister himself, followed by a stunning stew and fresh bread and laughter for dessert. The kind of friends you’d sit with, in a pickup, in the middle of the night to watch meteor showers.

I pick at the weeds stretching forth in various patches wondering if any of them are edible. A cool prickly breeze strokes my face and I know rain is going to fall out of the sky within minutes. I wipe my tools clean and place them back into the mailbox in my garden. I’m growing food, I think. Actually, I decide, a proper stew. And then I’m going to build a house with a proper woodburning stove, own a pickup truck, and spend more time with friends who write poetry.

Big drops start plopping on my shoulders from the sky as I head inside. Promises, indeed.