To Repel and Also Attract

Looking back from an afternoon's perspective, perhaps the dawn had a premonition.  Even at 7:30 a.m. the sun was reticent to rise, as though it, too, felt a lethargy that would be difficult to overcome.  Even the chickens were slow to descend once the ramp was lowered and the hatches raised.  It is, after all, the ebb of October, before November has found its flow.  Chilly but not quite cold, with a dank heaviness that more alluded to rain than promising it, the day has unfolded quietly and dimly.  Clouds have sobered the hours.  

There have been bookends.  This morning I connected with a community nurse to avail myself of a flu shot.  This afternoon, after weeks of unrealized intention, we spread manure on a few of the garden beds.  Twin actions:  one, forestalling a dreaded pestilence; the other, enriching a desired harvest.  Spent egg yolks in the former; spent digestion in the latter.  

I know nothing of those vaccinating eggs.  I have, however, had the flu and choose to take whatever steps I can to sidestep its approach.  I know there are naysayers on this subject, and while I respect their convictions, I will leave them to their vulnerability.  I take this other course.  

As for the manure, I am more acquainted with its provenance.  Almost daily my generously kind and long-suffering neighbor Art lugs buckets of the stuff he has mucked from his alpaca pens and deposits it in a pile near our garden.  I know he shakes his head at the labor, but I appreciate his solicitude and the contribution to our fertility.  In the best of times our soil needs all the help it can get, and at this time of year, post-planting and post-harvest, it is hungrier still.  It aches for organic matter and nutrient replacement, and I can only imagine the smiles of the microbial lives teeming beneath the surface.  But their nourishment comes at a price -- paid by the alpacas, I suppose, but certainly Art.  And then Lori and me.   Even after weeks and months of curing in the sun, shoveling the stuff into the cart is physical and aromatic work -- trip after trip.  Our garden beds are long; each demanding multiple loads which, once dumped, Lori spreads with a mixture of artistry and raking force while I return to the pile to repeat the steps.  

We are silent through the course of it -- each headphoned and attending to podcasts on the enneagram, a tool for understanding human "being" and "behaving" into which we are digging anew.  It is a topic fit for a day like this -- framed by weighty clouds, stuck with a preemptive needle, and laden with aged manure.  It's not that deepening one's self-understanding and those one loves is depressing; it's simply that it, too, is a weighty and subterranean work that is simultaneously clarifying, instructive, and sobering.  "Clarifying" and "instructive" because the study is enlightening; "sobering" because, so enlightened, it is easiest of all to become clearer about your darker dimensions.  It is insight that weighs a lot.  It feels good, somehow, to be strenuously physical in pursuit of it as a kind of counter balance, even if I look forward to the ibuprofen tablets surely in my future.

We manage to complete the three beds recently planted with garlic and then park the cart.  There are plenty more beds yet to go, but at least it's a start.  There will be other days.  We shifted our labors to the piles of spent plants and vines uprooted on a previous day, gathering them by the bundle and hauling them into the woods.  Detritus of a different sort.  

And then, as if on cue -- as if it could wait no longer -- it quietly, darkly began to rain.  The freshly covered soil will appreciate the soaking, as will the nascent cloves beneath the surface.  And taking a cue of our own, we move inside to continue our quietness.  Nothing is finished.  As the horse-drawn passenger in Robert Frost's memorable poem acknowledges, "...I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep."  But even as it has been good to move and to strain, it is good just now to pause for a bit and consider the miles we have already traveled since the dankness of that dawn...

...repelling...

...but also nourishingly attracting things deep within the soil...

... and ourselves.