“We sat with the baby at the table. She was feeling so much better after napping, that her blue sippy cup seemed to come alive with comedy. Pulling the rubber straw out of its hole, then laughing as if it had done it by itself, she threw the whole contraption down and watched it roll. Who hasn’t felt the joy of a “private joke”? Two adults full of lofty purpose, rediscovering the power of one baby’s pretense: merely, to catch the juice jar before it falls or hits the floor. Of course, it gets one thinking that the best games are meaningless. Possibly related to why we cling so hard to our repetitive pleasures, sometimes driven by the pitching arm of a one year old or a full-throated baby chortle, or even by click bait, that follows us until we succumb. I surrender. I really do. There is too much love that can’t be properly expressed, for anyone to sit on a high horse anymore. We don’t really have that much time. I was happy to think about the clouds building destructively in the morning, so that the afternoon might feel relief. I almost went back out, with my push mower, to prove some old fashioned truism, about working the land. Not many use scissors, the way I do, to avoid a weed whacker. But I crave the idiotic, fairy tale lack of utility that comes with needles in haystacks, or impossible tasks that do get done, just not how you thought they would. And in all those hours you cut with dull blades, the raking and the shoveling that is actually too much for you, but you do it anyway.. You deal with truck breakdowns, rust on things so you can’t ever sell them again, slow leaks and jobs that require tools you’ll never have, and so you’re living or floating, half in self possession, half in abject despair, abandonment & loneliness. I’m not being dramatic, at all, for a certain segment of society that hasn’t had much of a leg up. They don’t always hold with the “light & love” or “safety first” theories. But I will hold to the idea that there is a beautiful light in the forest. No one can bulldoze it away, or siphon off all its ephemeral ionic testosterone, or take it to the transfer station or sell it. And the more mystery that’s out there, that isn’t being solved by anyone in a fancy coffee shop, the better. I’ve wondered why I was making myself available, to strangers, with gardening problems, without any true screening process. Some of the gardens have been so messed up with synthetic fabrics and chemicals, why would I even care to deal with them? And all I’ve ever come up with, as I try to figure out how to drive from Barnard to Fayston, then to Middlebury and back home in a day, is that a ministry involving plants and caring for soil & respecting people who are trying to beautify their postage stamp, is well worth the gas money spent driving around the state. One lady explained to me that she wanted her grandkids to have blueberries off the bush, but there was more to it, as I noticed a sign in a perennial bed closer to the house, a memorial to her husband who had passed. So many stories, and amazing tales of courage and loss, that I work with, using dirt, basically, and the promise of flowers. The promise of flowers that will come back and bloom, again and again, even after we are gone.”
