A Tighter View and a Good Night's Sleep

The world looks different when viewed through the lens of a garden trench.  Eight inches wide, six inches deep, 25 feet long, seasoned with manure and webbed with weeds and vine or stalk or leaf, it is a narrow frame, viewed from the knees and in close detail.  From that vantage point it is the basics that take center stage -- what belongs, what is encroaching; what's vigorous and what has wilted or been chewed; what needs lifting and tying and what prefers to be left alone.  Are the bugs present beneficial or destructive?  What needs more time on the vine and what should be plucked and brought inside for dinner?

They are simple, ground level questions, answers for which drive toward still more elemental concerns about moisture, soil content and character, microbial activity, spacing and sunlight.  What are the needs, how does nature satisfy them, and what are the inhibitors in the way?  The latter might include this spring's overly generous rains followed closely by last month's high heat and stingy clouds; Monday night's fierce winds and the ever-threatening battalions of rabbits and deer and beetles and worms.  As to the former, there are the obvious fertilizers and rains, sunlight and time, the incredible will of the seed to sprout and flourish and fruit, and of course me.  I have, in the planting and tending, fitted into that ground level economy and try to do my part, as the sweated through clothes and empty Gatorade bottles bear witness.

I track such elemental questions and considerations back across the rest of my experience along with the mud on my shoes, creating something of a mess.  It's harder to get interested in the miscellany that fills the newscasts and conversations.  I don't care what they name the new royal baby.  I have not invested time parsing Miley Cyrus' lyrics; I have mustered neither curiosity about the Kardashian's latest forays in fame nor concern about Lindsay Lohan's current well-being or legal status.  Congressional melodrama doesn't even rise to the level of a bad sit-com.  And if the government wants to waste time listening to my phone conversations or reading my emails I can only apologize for the boredom that will inevitably ensue; I can't seem to muster either righteous outrage or patriotic defense.  When held up against the health of the soil or the miracle of growth or the ecstasy of that long-awaited BLT, all that other seems thinly trivial if not altogether silly.

And I have to admit that it feels like a gift to be so tired at the end of the day to simply fall asleep without the least bit of appetite for the 10 pm digest of the day's earth-shattering events.  After all, there will be weeds to pull in the morning, water jugs to fill and dispense, and, with any luck, tomatoes and peppers and squash to pick.

Which sounds far more earth-shattering to me.