Greetings!

With just under one week until our first CSA pickup, the garden is moving right along.  Bright, beautiful lettuce heads are filling out, two kinds of kale, radishes, mustard greens tender and big for braising, scallions, and pea shoots will all be ready for munching come next Tuesday.  The chickens are robust and hilarious as ever, and learning the new, fun game of Worm Rugby as they explore the delights of outdoor life.  This week’s update is a two-for-one bargain to make up for last week’s (busy!) silence.

Here’s a quote from Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim At Tinker Creek:

“Cruelty is a mystery and the waste of pain.  But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull.  Unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitious.  About five years ago I saw a mockingbird make a straight vertical descent from the roof gutter of a four-story building.  It was an act as careless and spontaneous as the curl of a stem or the kindling of a star.

The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped.  His wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from  a limb and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through empty air.  Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass.  I had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no one else in sight.  The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest.  The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them.  The least we can do is try to be there.”

Howdy Members,

Gratitude is a dynamic thing, and one part about farming that I love often seems to come as a disclaimer to farm work: hours of repetitive, sometimes “boring” labor.  But it’s often only in these times that I can turn down the volume of my brain cranking out infinitely long To-Do lists, let my body run by muscle memory, and take in my natural surroundings—which always brings me back to gratitude.

Today it’s the bobolinks.  When we were laying out the placement of the garden, Thomas and I drove stakes into the four corners of the field, and one in the dead center for perspective.  These wooden stakes have turned into ideal perches for the birds, who seem to embrace the limelight like naturals, singing all through the day.  Sometimes it feels like they’re surrounding me on all sides with song, and when I look up from my squash hill planting, I realize they are—even singing as they’re curlicue diving through the sky, driving out the red-winged blackbirds and maintaining their nesting territory.  They blow up their chests and even their comical, colorblindedly-coordinated, sandy feather toupees stand on end and expand to call out their song for the day.  To double one’s volume for song—if that’s not virtue, I don’t know what is!

Here’s a poem by Jane Kenyon.

Song

and in the hotel kitchen

the chef sweetens cream for pastries.

Far off, lightning and thunder agree

to join us for a few days

here in the valley.  How lucky we are

to be holding hands on a porch

in the country.  But even this

is not the joy that trembles

under every leaf and tongue.