The Long Game

 I watch the young chickens while I water on the deck.  The labor allows for considerable watching.  Our deck is ringed with vertical PVC pipes - 18, plus the 14 French flower cans suspended in a steel frame - filled with potting soil, sown various herb seeds.  Watering doesn’t require much concentration.  The pipes stand just taller than the deck rail, no bending involved, and aim is the only requirement.  It is slow, quotidian work; mindless in that liberating way that untethers my attention, allowing it to drift like a stringless kite and snag on whatever branch or chimney or light pole happens into its path.  

Those, or chickens.  The young ones are segregated into a partitioned section of the chicken yard. With only a wire fence between them, there is plenty of opportunity for mutual observation and curious envy between these 12-week-olds and the mature ones on the other side.  Eventually the adolescents will make the great migration into the big yard, making room for the next round of chicks even now trading down for feathers in the brooder in the barn, but for now their sequestration affords them a little kinder, more protected environment while they continue to grow.  There will be time enough in the weeks ahead for their skirmishes with the big girls, and their introductions into the ways of life administered by Dwayne the rooster.  For now, they flit and flurry their way from water to feed to bug to whatever else they happen to see.  

And I tip the watering can from pole to pole, spotting tiny sprouts slowing emerging.  

These early days of the growing season recalibrate my sense of time.  What a tuning fork is to the ears, a seed - a chick - is to the soul.  Someone once said, “Never travel faster than your guardian angels can fly.”  Carrie Newcomer lyricises that wisdom into the caution not to “travel faster than our souls can go.”  The farmstead constantly counsels me not to live faster than seeds can grow; than buds open into flowers; than bees make honey; than fruit ripens.  To live at the speed of soul.  Pouring on more water, after all, won’t speed up the process.

Every day, then, I fill the can and sprinkle the seeds, and wonder with awe at all that might be happening around me.

And within.

This Sanguine Moment in Time

 

There is a soulful sanguinity to this transitional moment.  Garden planting is complete, save for a few more flowers intended to feed the bees (and our own aesthetic hunger).  The supportive systems – the wire cages, the trellises and the plastic drip lines – are in place and functioning.  After a frenetic and tiresome few weeks of furrowing and transplanting, the initiating work is done.  Exclamation and exhalation are both warranted and earned.  There is always work to do, but in this still and transient moment, we rest in the transition between construction and maintenance.  On this holiday weekend we intend to do a little of both: basking in the satisfaction, and taking a deep breath.

 

But as that opening sentence suggests, it is not simply that the startup work is completed.  More than anything it is that the work is a down payment on hope.  We haven’t sored our muscles and exhausted our energies merely for the good and righteous discipline of it.  It was all in service to the prospect of growth – that the work would eventually lead to something, produce something, that is profoundly good.  And “here” is the only place to start if we want to arrive “there”, at harvest.  I am spiritual enough to know that grace is real, and that blessings quite often fall on the undeserving and the unprepared.  Good things sometimes simply come whether we have seeded them or not.  I have been the beneficiary of too many of those to count to scoff at the wonder and the joy of them.  But cultivation never got in the way of grace.  I don’t think God takes offense at the little bit of spade work we can contribute to the alchemy of abundance.  Hence, the sweat and the fatigue and the ever-sore muscles.

 

But even harvest is not the ultimate denouement.  It, too - as good and celebratory as it will be – is but the precursor to the kitchen, which is the on-ramp to the dining room with its plated wonders and delights, and the satiated, satisfied smiles that result. 

 

For now, of course, the garden is more brown than green; more loosened soil than sturdy plants.  But those nascent seedlings, both transplanted whole and popping up from below, will have their day.  Hope will find its height and breadth and, if the malefactors are held at bay, its fruit. 

 

That is a question for another day, the predations that are always lurking and how to counter them.  This morning I am sitting on the deck in the cool of a quiet holiday, admiring the work and its promise. 

 

Hopeful. 

Sanguine. 

A deep and grateful breath. 

Rested.

Smiling.

Savoring the anticipation of the flavors just beginning to stir.

Holiness in the Dirt

The work days were interestingly bookended.  We started the week spreading worm poop – a ton of it; literally 2000 pounds of it – and ended the week spreading chicken poop.  It’s a sentence that I couldn’t have imagined writing not too many years ago, but there it is:  manure in all its glory, large and small, put to the ancient use of fertility.  Reality is more exciting than the facts might sound.

 

It is planting season of course.  The grass is growing, the chickens are laying, the dandelions are blooming, the flower beds are bursting, the rain barrels are filling.   And we have been working.   The garden beds have been prepared – cleared of remnant detritus and lightly tilled; scored with a hoe and drilled with an auger, the seeds have been meted out and the greenhouse seedlings have been transplanted.  The tomato cages have been placed - though their securing still needs reinforcement - and the irrigation drip tapes have been unrolled into place.  

 

Life has been nudged forward in the direction of color and fruit, and thanks to the earthworms and the chickens, it has been encouraged.  Fed.  Nourished. Beckoned.  With the manure.  Small and large; worm and hen, bucket and shovel wielded by Lori and me.  It gets down to basics - far from any glamour, it’s about the humble building blocks.  The occasional rains will surely help, and when it refuses, the faucet.  Sunlight will do its part, as will we with the hoe.  But it’s the soil that will make the difference – the soil, elevated by the excrement.

 

I once heard a famous chef observe that cuisines were born out of the creative use of the poor leftovers, the discards, the refuse.  The result, he said with a smile, was the inversion of desire.  Having discerned its quieter value, that creative use elevated and popularized the previously maligned, overshadowing the once-preferred. 

 

I have no idea who figured out this miracle of manure – above who’s ancient head the bulb of insight flashed on – but it’s funny to recognize that same inversion in the garden.  What comes out of the ground as food is beneficially returned to it in digested, concentrated form.  As important as are the seeds and the seedlings, it’s the shit that is the salvation.  

 

I suspect that truth is resident and operational in all manner of pursuits – for those with the patience to wait for it, the vision to discern it, and adequate humility to wield the shovel and carry the bucket and entertain the possibility that mouths are not the only valuable orifice.  I have work to do in that regard, but in the chicken yard and the garden I have good teachers. 

 

And plenty of opportunities to learn.

 

We shovel, then, and turn in the promise:  a kind of genuflection amidst the sacrament of the soil.