"Nothing is wasted on the writer."

narrative flowers, garden blues (Houseman, Hopkins, on harmony)

The moment: Saturday afternoon, May 7, 2008, 2:11 pm.

The place: a house on the top of a hill, not far from the small town of Saxtons River, Vermont.

The view: a southeast facing window in which a vividly green meadow, exclamation-marked with a stand of tall silver-white birches, is framed first by woods, then sinuous curve after curve of ranged mountains stretching twenty miles away into New Hampshire.  (Yesterday, a day of pleasant, slightly cool drizzle and mist, the meadow was blanketed in white; I could not see even as far as the birches. The view changes with the moment. The picture shows this same view, as taken by David Koff, last fall).

Close up, below me, is the garden in which I have just spent an hour working, sun-hatted and SPF 55'd to a fare-thee-well. I rarely even go outside in full sun 10:30 am and 4:00  pm if I can avoid it, let alone garden at high noon. I'm protective of my skin, probably to the point of fanaticism. But at this time of year, the black flies, no-see'ums and mosquitoes come out ravenous at the hours before dusk, the time I prefer gardening, and they are bloodthirsty. DEET only seems to piss them off, and I think they view the organic stuff, with citronella, cedar, and oil of geranium, as a condiment. So, because the pole beans and swiss chard needed to get in without delay, just for today I conceded defeat to the insects, braving the UV rays instead.(Pictured: a basket of vegetables from my last year's garden, prepared for a friend last fall; this is one reason why gardening is so worth it. The basket, by the way, is one of the old split-oak baskets I brought with me from Arkansas; it transported breakfast to many a Dairy Hollow House guest. Photo, David Koff. )  

Though I went to work in the vegetable garden, the flower beds also called me. As I weeded them, I thought of one of the slow yearly parades I was witnessing: that of the blue flowers.

The first had been the woods-violets I'd transplanted in here and there into the beds, and simultaneous with them, the pulmonaria, lungwort, its blossoms a pale but vivid blue. Both had their moment, their small short bloomings, and have gone now. The foliage remains; the heart shaped violet leaves, the lung-shaped leaves of the pulmonaria, an almost kelly green dotted with tiny specks of white, as if someone had shaken over them a paint-brush dipped in a pale tempera. "Glory be to God for dappled things," wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins in the poem "Pied Beauty"; though Hopkin's version of God is not mine, I revel with him in the glory of "all things counter, original, spare, strange; whatever is fickle, freckled..."

Lungworts are small-scaled and give the impression of delicacy, but here at least, they are healthy and vigorous, and mark the precise corner of the house where sun turns to shade. This plant is one I was unfamiliar with in Arkansas, though it may well grow there. ( A quick Internet check and I've learned that it does; in fact, according to the University of Arkansas Agricultural Extension Service, it's even "deer-resistant", something that is a non-issue here but was huge back there, where there were no coyotes or other predators to keep the deer population in check. I had a friend whom, whenever we were out driving back where I used to live, and we'd pass a herd of 15 or 20 deer, grazing fearlessly by the road, would roll down the window and holler at them, "Get a job!")

Anyway, to me, pulmonaria is associated with living in Vermont. This is especially true because I bought this particular plant two years ago, at the annual Putney Public Library perennial sale. Every time I admire or weed around that plant, part what goes through my mind is the unknown book-lover who dug up that particularly vibrant specimen, and brought it to the library parking lot on the allocated day. And there I bought it, probably for slightly above-market price, but gladly so: enriching my garden and the library which has, after all, as its motto says, been "opening minds since 1793!" (exclamation mark theirs).

So: blue flowers. The pulmonaria, come and gone... so too the deep, midnight blue-black of the emerging wild blue cohosh. They're not flowers, true (their flowers are yellow, and come later, long after their foliage has lightened to green), but their initial up-shooting curled, finely cut leaves in the early spring woods are almost otherworldly, as you might expect from a plant with such a fine pedigree as an healing herb. Now the cohosh is larger, and green.

I said goodbye to the last few lilac sprays by the front door today, too, not without sadness. This is not only because I love lilacs, but because who is to say whether I will have the privilege of witnessing them again?  As A.E. Houseman said,

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

I doubtless have far less than fifty springs ahead of me (though maybe not, considering Aunt Dot's longevity). Then, too, this is the lilac bush which had only a few sprays of blossom when I moved here. Three years ago, not really knowing what I was doing, I asked around, read, took the advice I got on faith, took a deep breath, and pruned that poor lilac bush within an inch of its life. It finally rewarded me this year for such brutal treatment with lush, thick, fragrant cascades of bloom on almost every branch. This lilac bush and I have a relationship. And while I don't know anything about feng shui, it has to be superb feng shui to have a gorgeous, fragrant, flower-covered shrub right by the step as you enter the house, even if it's only fragrant and flower-covered two weeks out of the year.

(Thought: perhaps we all need brutal pruning now and then for our ultimate growth. This would explain a lot, wouldn't it?) 

As the lilac blossoms depart, the irises are coming into bloom. I have the tall, old-fashioned ones Aunt Dot left here. They're royal purple, with soft in-curved white throats and those fuzzy, showy, yellow caterpillar-looking things known as  "beards". The iris scent isn't as wholly seductive and enveloping, almost excessively sweet, as that of the lilacs. It's more complex, and subtler. When I inhale an open iris --- you have to get your nose right into it to do this --- the distinctive fragrance is powerfully calming, at least to me. It's also intriguing, because, what is it? How would you describe it? It's familiar and yet not. I'd say the scent is something like a combination of grape soda, lemon and talcum powder, but much more delicious than that sounds. David's nostrils read it as nutmeg.

But there they are, and, being irises, there they very much are: sword-like foliage, soldier-straight stems, those blossoms, larger than my fist and so bold, yet at the same time, in their openness and the tender frill of their petals, so achingly vulnerable. And then, the unopened iris buds, deep purple furled tightly onto themselves, tips boldly, eagerly peering up from their protective green wrapping. Ready, as youth is, to burst.

While the iris blooms display their glorious selves, what may be the most intense, prettiest blue of all is just about to arrive: that of the bachelor buttons (cornflowers). I did buy this perennial plant at a local nursery, so it has less narrative mojo to me than the pulmonaria. But, I first admired it at the Ozark garden of my friend, the herbalist Jim Long of Long Creek Herbs, so I do have some story-connection with it, which (as you no doubt know by now), in my view strengthens any plant's own inherent beauty or utility. The sturdy pot of bachelor buttons I bought did so well that I've divided them two years in a row, and this year, the divisions are coming on like gangbusters. (Picture: me, Jim Long, and a biiiiiig honking poster of The Cornbread Gospels. This was taken in early 2007, probably by David, at the Unitarian Church in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. )

Or more accurately --- what is a "gangbuster" anyway? --- like small cobalt blue fireworks, spread throughout the three different flowerbeds that border the house on the side facing the meadow. I love their color, and that as long as you cut them back, they'll pretty much bloom all summer. I love them in arrangements and bouquets,too. But bachelor buttons have one major drawback: no fragrance.

I was rinsing out the emptied compost bucket with water from the hose when --- but wait! The hose! I have to say something about the hose! It's back in service!  After having been disconnected and drained and lain dormant all winter in the basement!  The very hose itself says Spring! Summer! Change! I am so happy to be using it again! All this is part appreciating the extremity of Vermont's yearly cycle ... Anyway, somewhere in there, I began picturing a bouquet of all the blue flowers: the lilacs and irises, the lungwort, the bachelor buttons, the hydrangeas still to come, the curling blue-black foliage of the blue cohosh. How well they would all look together! I'd put them in the white pitcher with the ribbed sides...

And yet, it's an impossible bouquet, except imaginatively; these blue flowers are simply not in season at the same time.

Their individual transitory natures, their rootedness in a particular moment, makes them more precious, as rarity often does. As we age our appreciation of experiences like brief lilacs, grows greater and more bittersweet: they must go, we know it; therefore, what poignant joy that they have arrived.

(The alternative to this poignant coming and going is something like what we've done to the strawberry. That's a fruit which is extraordinary, simply unbelievable: when eaten in its own time and place, a strawberry is as fresh, local, full of its own essence and juice and flesh and fragrance as anything one puts in one's mouth could possibly be. But it's brief, this perfection. In our greed for experiencing the strawberry beyond its brief natural appearance, what do we do? We buy strawberries grown 1500 miles away. Though red outside, they are white, fibrous and flavorless at the core, because they're usually of varieties selected for their ability to withstand the rigors of travel. They're picked under-ripe, travel thousands of miles in their small individual small plastic suitcases.  Add up the costs: the fertilizers, the underpaid migrant pickers exposed to pesticides, the fossil-fueled tractors and transport, the plastic... all this for the shadow of the ghost of a fruit that bears little resemblance to a true, succulent, wet, red-to-its-heart strawberry. Wouldn't it be better just to wait? To revel in true strawberries intensely and even excessively, but at what is actual strawberry time? ). Picture: my Vermont pals Albert and Phyllis, and Albert's favorite dessert, made on his birthday: fresh strawberry shortcake with Vermont strawberries. A shortcake, to him, belongs on yellow cake, not biscuit. This was taken last summer on the screened porch, by David. I've mentioned Albert here before; he kindly tills my garden for me each year (and not so kindly critiques it and much else, that old smart-ass!).

My bouquet of blue flowers exists only in my mind, as does the impossible dinner that Louis and Elsie Freund attend, along with my father, and Ned, and David, and Chou-Chou, and Shelley, and Aunt Dot and Jim Cherry, and Gaelen and Rich, and Jan Brown and Bill Haymes, Hattie Mae, Tori Taff (pictured... just because I wanted an excuse to see her again and smile; taken by David last December in Nashville Tennesee), KJ and Clary and KJ's new girlfriend... the living and the dead, the loved, each of whom were here or are here for their brief season, seasons which are not simultaneous and can never be, friends and loved ones who, even when living simultaneously, are scattered.

Those most consistently present in our minds and hearts, our beloveds, at least those who still reside at an earthly address, generally come together simultaneously only twice: once when we marry, once at our death. Ideally, we have one wedding and one funeral apiece. One of which we (presumably) aren't exactly present for.

The moment is now 4:14 pm. (Later note, in the interest of full disclosure: it was 4:14 pm when I wrote the first draft of this post... But I came back and messed with and edited it it later, several times; I did not write, link, add photos et al, in a mere two hours and wouldn't want you to think I had.) Though the place and the view are much the same, it is time for me to get a move on. I'm driving South to hear the brilliant James Howard Kunstler, whose writing and thinking I've long admired, speak at Marlboro College's Graduate Center in Brattleboro. He wrote The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century   which I have not yet read, as well as Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's  Man-Made Landscape, which I have, years ago. I loved, loved, loved that book, though it was troubling, as all Kunstler's work is. It kept me going, "Ah-HAH! Now I get it! Oh, yes, of course!" about all kinds of things that had bothered me but which I'd never fully understood in context. And it brought together my own long-term interest in environment and ecology with Ned's work as an historic preservationist with a strong background in urban design and American Studies.

Now, it is not lost on me that it will be a 42-mile round trip, by car, to hear a talk given by someone who understands the automobile, and the creation of the suburbs that went with it, to be more or less spawn of the devil and seed of the eventual downfall of our lifestyle as we know it.

But you know (this might surprise, even shock, you) --- this is not the first inconsistency I've come across in myself and my actions.

That ever happen to you?

Ohhhhhhh-krahoma: eat/be eaten, "write naked" , vegetable chameleons

Ohhhhh-krahoma! (Or, the color purple).

On Thursday I found actual okra plants, starts, seedlings! (If this doesn't seem like big news to you , please go back and read the post for May 27). So maybe I will get some honest-to-goodness non "curiosity" okra from my very own garden this year. I'm still going to plant my okra seeds, though, anyway.I've now got two varieties of seedlings, one the old standby Clemson Spineless, (this is the type I have seeds of, and are probably the ones pictured left; I think I planted this variety in the Ozarks for a good twenty-five years). The other is the showier "Burgundy".

This latter variety of okra shares a strange horticultural/ culinary habit, one of transformation in hue. I know of only a few other plants that do this. Like the string-bean" Purple Queen " (which has beautiful purple pods) and the asparagus "Purple Passion" (which emerges from the ground with its proud, rather sexual helmets and stalks a reddish-pink purple), "Burgundy" retains its eccentric, splendid color only while raw, turning green once cooked. Perhaps some master gardener or botanist out there can tell me why? Or if there are other edible plants that do this? (Pictured: one of my darling new okra seedlings, safely nestled in the ground in our garden. I swear it grew a quarter-inch overnight, and then another quarter-inch on Saturday afternoon, when there was a light, warm, on-and-off rain).

Thomas Jefferson was a passionate gardener (check out the care with which he recorded matters in his garden book ... if they had made digital cameras in his day, oh, good God). Late in life, he was asked his age and is said to have replied, "I am an old man, but a young gardener." By which I think he meant, that gardening, like writing, always has something new and unlooked for to teach the person who practices it with humility and devotion, And when you are learning and in wonder, are you so often are when practicing in this way, you are always young.

Here is how Cathy, who blogs at Growing Curious, put it, in a May 18 post:

I don't think it's possible to "do a garden."  I think the garden "does us."
Before I began gardening... I imagine(d) (a) contained experiment:  growing a few things for the summer just for the fun of it.  I didn't realize how even that would change me. Now, I truly think part of me would shrivel up and die if I didn't organize parts of my life around the garden.  Every month -- sometimes every day -- something out there astounds, bewilders, or humbles me.

I grow with the plants.

David is here, safe and sound, arriving in a Chevy Aveo, the rental car du jour, late Wednesday... The car was so schoolbus-taxi bright yellow that he took a picture of it when we went out to Walker Farm Friday and bought more seedlings: the okras mentioned above, tomatillos and muskmelons (I've never grown either of these before), plus a variety of eggplant I'd never even heard of, Jilo Tingua Verde Claro. It's from Brazil of all places, and it allegedly starts out green and turns a bright streaky red-orange as it ripened. That makes three types of eggplant in this year's garden, the other two being the large classic Italian (the one you see most often in supermarkets), and the thinner, elongated Asian. The latter is said to be prolific and fast to bear, important in climates where spring comes late and winter, early, though the summer days in between are incredibly long. And we got two more heirloom tomato varieties, one called Japanese Black Trifle (!) and the other Zapotec. And they're all planted. And watered and tucked in.

It could certainly be said that I live in my head too much. I'm a thinker, perhaps an overthinker; I'm content spending hours at the computer and sometimes have to remind myself to get up, get out, move around, go for a walk, maybe work-out... But oh my lord, for all the brain-business, I do revel gratefully in the five senses, too. This time of year smelling and touching probably predominate in the Parade of Sensual Pleasures. Soft hands? Pretty fingernails? Not a chance; I can't force myself to wear gardening gloves. Not when the feel of the moist rich soil, and especially of crumbling the homemade compost that was once our kitchen scraps, egg shells and watermelon rinds et al, into the garden, is so irresistible. It's as intoxicatingly full of life to my lucky fingers as the humus-y fragrance of the earth itself is to my nostrils.

Though I imagine, like Ned and my father and many of the people I love, I'll opt for having this body cremated when I'm done with it, part of me thinks it would be just fine, in fact, rather lovely, to be buried directly, bare, in the earth, to quietly decompose way down below someone's vegetable garden (maybe this very one?). It pleases me to imagine the matter which makes up my physical being reincarnating in the form of a pod of burgundy okra, or a Jilo Tingua Verde Claro eggplant, a sugar snap pea, or a Brandywine tomato.

But then, I think the basic stripped-down contract of life as an incarnated being on earth is this: everyone eats and is eaten.

It's such a fragrant time of year. David caught me, left, as I was burying my nose in the lilacs outside the front door. And digging holes for sorrel in the herb garden yesterday, my arm brushed against some creeping thyme, some rosemary, and the herbal fragrance came up into the sun-warmed air powerfully and traveled into my nose, and as the smell arrived in my brain, more swiftly even than thought could arrive, I found I was singing: "Are you going to Scarborough Fair? Parsley sage rosemary and thyme..." Nearby, the cats stretched, lolled, did languorous show-offy rolls in the warm dirt, waiting for me to wise up and give them some attention. David, coming around from the other wide of the house with a red wheelbarrow full of compost, did so, pausing to do some kitty belly-scratching, softly murmuring their names.

"So much/ depends /  upon / a red  wheel / barrow," wrote William Carlos Williams, and it does.

(Click here for an interesting essay and discussion of that poem. Or, on the other hand, don't; just roll in Williams' words, like the cats in the soil. Pick your pleasure.).

Gardening with David. You know, as much as I adored Ned and as many activities as we shared, Ned was color-blind. Green and brown were the same color to him (he used to have me pick up out which tie went with which shirt for him). So, while he would occasionally indulge me by working with me in the garden, he never really enjoyed it. (Though he used to joke about creating a "gigantea garden", where everything would be Ned-sized; he was 6 feet 4 inches tall. There'd be, for instance, elephant ears, no short little wussy caladiums; tulip trees, not mere tulips, and for garden furniture gigantic stone benches, Stonehenge-ish, that everyone else would need to use steps to be able to clamber up. But all this was just riff, never an actual on-the-books project.)

Now, David loves gardening. Gardening with a partner, even one who isn't around all the time and so misses some of the small and large daily revelations, is for me new, different, and deeply satisfying. Indeed, our self-satisfaction with this state of affairs is evident in this snap DK took, holding the camera away from him and clicking.

Ou sonts les cukes d'antan?

Last year, a neighbor gave me some of his leftover cucumber starts. Against my better judgment, knowing how prolific they are, I planted them all. Good LORD what a lot of cukes! One morning I went out and picked eighteen cucumbers... Fortunately that was the morning of the annual New England Children's Book Writers and Illustrators picnic, a great event which has been going on in these parts  30-some years. So, of course, I made a huge vat of cucumber yogurt soup, spiked with mint, sweetened with pureed green grapes, given a little textural heft with a handful of walnuts; it was very well-received by the assembled, who drank cup after cup of it...

Oh! Speaking of children's book writers! My friend Peter Gould (novelist, performer, director, playwright --- it is impossible to read or see his "A Peasant of El Salvador" performed without weeping --- teacher, activist ) just dropped me an email. His first young adult novel, Write Naked, has just been published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. He described it as being about, "... a teen-age boy, a teen-age girl, a log cabin, Vermont, salamanders, global warming, young love, and (an) old typewriter." It's the one he's holding in lap in the picture he sent, left. This description alone tells me this book will be right up my alley. And knowing how really hard it is to get fiction published these days, the book had to be excellent to get a place at FS & G ... Thus, my interest would be piqued even if I didn't have so much long-time admiration for Peter's writing and other work. I think I'll do a book party for him here sometime this summer, and maybe review the book here, too. More to come. 

Anyway, back to the cukes. So, last summer, given their abundance, just as an experiment I froze some raw cucumber puree, figuring that A) given its high moisture content it would probably freeze beautifully and B) there might be some hot days when cucumber soup would hit the spot but our own cukes might not yet be up, and wouldn't it be handy to have some in the freezer?    
   
Night before last was the night it was handy. I'm happy to report this simple method of preserving cucumbers works well. Dinner, unintentionally, was green and white (and easy). The cucumber soup from the thawed frozen puree from last year's garden was delicious. Then there was asparagus, roasted as described on the May 9 post (it was so fresh it was almost slapping itself; it came from about 30 miles south, in Massachusetts). A vegetable burger from the co-op. A small slice of feta cheese. A large slice of some toothsome, serious olive-and-rosemary sourdough artisinal bread, toasted and buttered with herb butter (the herbs from my own garden). A glass of Cortese.

Eating, together, a meal which included something from last year's garden, but with the dirt from this year's-garden-to-be still under our fingernails. In time, out of time, timeless, life's red wheel barrow slowly spinning as David and I ate dinner.

I don't think it's possible to "do a garden."  I think the garden "does us."
Before I began gardening... I imagine(d) (a) contained experiment:  growing a few things for the summer just for the fun of it.  I didn't realize how even that would change me. Now, I truly think part of me would shrivel up and die if I didn't organize parts of my life around the garden.  Every month -- sometimes every day -- something out there astounds, bewilders, or humbles me.

I grow with the plants.

Playing Scrabble with the dead, feasting at the Brattleboro Farmers Market (with the very much alive)

The other day, Saturday, I'm driving down the unpaved road which leads from from my home at the top of the down to Westminster West Road. I'm with Traca Savadago, my "pan pal" and all-around buddy. She's a friend in the meet and instantly feel you've known each other a long time category, though we've actually only known each other since 2006. Traca lives in from Seattle, where I've visited her the past two springs; now she's come to visit in me here in Vermont. Today we're off to the Brattleboro farmer's market. The market takes place every Saturday, May through October; its atmosphere is like a festival or a fair, as perhaps you'd expect after our long, long winters. 

As we travel down the shady curving canopied tunnel, so green this time of year, we start talking about carbon footprints and "relentless incrementalism." The latter is one of my favorite concepts, one I return to in thought over and over: that small steps, taken incrementally, make a difference in aggregate and over time, individually and collectively. These days, living as far out in the country as I do, I am religious in trying to limit driving. Traca talks about wishing she'd kept her Metro instead of upgrading, as she saw it at the time, to an Accord and "driving around with the trunk full all the time because I now have a trunk." I say, in passing, "Well, of course given how much air travel I've done between now and when The Cornbread Gospels came out, I could not drive the whole rest of the year and I'd still have a carbon footprint the size of a yeti."

And then I pause, having quickly gone somewhere else in thought. I tell her the following story, because. since I trust narrative, I also trust digression, and my friends, fortunately, accept this:

"Ned and I used to play cutthroat Scrabble religiously. We actually kept a running tally in the Official Scrabble Dictionary --- we tracked the scores of individual games, our lifetime wins and losses (at the time he died he came out exactly equal), the bingos we had in individual games... Once I won on the very last turn with a bingo, the word towhee, which is a kind of bird. For weeks afterwards, out of nowhere, Ned would suddenly turn to me with a look of disgust and say 'Towhee!' and shake his head...

"Well, once I played the word 'yeti.' He challenged it, and of course he lost, because it's a real word. So he forfeits a turn, and he's bummed, or mock-bummed. And then, either in the same game or the one following, I had that same combination of letters, so I once more put down Y-E-T-I. And Ned looked at me mournfully and said, 'Yeti again.' "

Traca and I traveled conversationally as we drove the West-West Road through Putney, down 91 and into Brattleboro and to the Farmer's Market. This would be my first visit this year. I always forget how much I love the experience of this particular farmer's market. It's in a tree-covered, park-like area, not a parking lot, and as Traca pointed out, it's both inviting and inclusive. "There are actually places to sit," she says, waving one hand.
"Look, if you buy something to eat there are tables, it's not just, fine, you sit on the curb. And it's so kid-friendly...That sandbox? You would never see that in Seattle." Traca always, and I mean always, has her camera at hand.

She started with the sandbox (left, above), and soon she was finding, and taking, pictures everywhere. Two little girls sitting together on a tree trunk, giggling, wrapped in a a shared sweatshirt. Flats of basil plants, arugula, snapdragons. Farmers, customers, musicians, close-ups of plates of food and bags of homemade granola.

I'd skipped breakfast and Traca had only had a couple of blueberry corn muffins leftover from breakfast yesterday, so we started out by sharing a corn-and-black bean tamale. (As at any market, if you shop while hungry you wind up buying twice as much food). As we sat, picking apart the tamale (a little underdone, but what a wonderful smoky sauce), I caught sight of Andy Reichsman, who sometimes does camera work with my filmmaker boyfriend, David. Andy's also the brother of my friend Judith Reichsman, who teaches Interplay, an improvisation, movement, and storytelling melange I go to most Thursdays. I introduced Traca to Andy, and then we meandered a bit, separately. (Pictured left, dinner at our home about a year ago. Left to right; Andy, his wife, film-editor Kate Purdie on his lap, Kamoji, an old friend of David's, Lisa Merton, a Vermont-based filmmaker, David, with the silver beard, me in the green sweater with Cattywhompus on my lap, and Alan Dater, Lisa's husband. Alan, Lisa, Kamoji, and David have a long and lovely two-degrees-of-separation relationship, involving Taking Root, Alan and Lisa's most recent film, about Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan Nobel-prize-winning environmentalist, and David's 1973 film, White Man's Country).

But back to the Brattleboro Farmer's Market. Though I had intended to purchase vegetables (David was coming in later that night, from L.A., I wanted glorious ingredients on hand), I wound up spending most of my cash, and a little of Traca's besides, on starts for the garden instead. The tomato varieties alone were intoxicating in their names: Mr. Stripey, Brandywine, Rubygold, Aunt Ruby, Boxcar Willie , San Marzano. But I got peppers, too: cayenne, jalapeño, red bell, Thai. And lots of lettuce, five different varieties. And cauliflower, broccoli, and eggplant seedlings (two varieties) as well. Growing lettuces and cabbage family members is a revelation to me, because in Arkansas it was always way too hot; just seeing the small familiar leaf shapes of the tiny cauliflowers-to-be made me happy. Another summer in Vermont, where we don't need air-conditioning! I'm here! And I was: present at the farmer's market, anticipating this year's garden, looking back to last year's. Thinking about how these tiny optimistic seedlings would, presumably, become like the broccoli I kept running out to cut from August through frost last year, and the strange, extraterrestrial-looking Brussels sprouts which got sweeter and sweeter the colder it got until there was a hard freeze (Check the link to see just how odd a stalk of Brussels sprouts is in its manner of growing... but I couldn't resist this picture, taken by David, of Wislawa, the sister of Cattywhompus, above, in last year's garden, in the late fall. She's crouched beneath the leaves of one of the Brussels sprout plants).

As much as I love living in Vermont, there is this major drawback: it is almost too cold here to grow okra. I say 'almost' because know it can be done. My favorite farmstand, Walker's, does sell okra each fall, but they sell it as "an ornamental curiosity." And for 50 cents a pod! I'm an okra girl from way back, and I am determined to grow it here, though you probably have to start the seeds indoors, which I didn't get done this year, so I may not succeed until 2009. And it probably will never thrive as it did in my Arkansas garden, with its spectacular circus-yellow hibiscus-flowers and its pods pointing straight up, little dicks with enthusiastic erections. 50 cents a pod? A curiosity? Puh-lease! Horrifying, if not downright insulting, to me. I may have one foot in the North and one in the South, but I am a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, after all, and proud of it.

I heard someone call my name, loudly, and looked up from these meditations and general seedling-selection samadhi to see Ami, my friend whom I somehow haven't seen for several months, wearing an orange velvet jacket, her young grandson clinging to one of her ankles. Our hug is long. We have so much to say that we actually say, in words, very little.

I continue buying seedlings greedily from a couple of different farmers (John and Tessa, the folks from Dutton's) who are kind enough to let me leave the flats with them while I go off in search of Traca and more lunch. Traca has fallen into a deep and soulful conversation with an older German artist, whose beautiful silver hair and bangs caught the sunlight. She was wearing what looked like a hand-knit shrug-wrap of a deep rose pink, and carrying a basket of posies, their green leaves silvery as her hair, their flowers as pink as her sweater.  Traca (who took a picture of her basket, left) was getting her story: how she'd come to the U.S. many years ago as a student, married an American she'd met just a few days after she'd arrived in New York. They were still married, 40-some years down the line, twenty of which had been lived in Vermont...  (Traca has the gift of connection big-time; if she was in Tibet and yetis did exist, she would have one telling her his favorite restaurant; she would be asking if he had tasted the yak butter sorbet in that little place in Lhasa; it would turn out the yeti's brother-in-law had worked in the kitchen there.)

Since Traca was still grooving with her new friend, I stood in line for both of us at the Thai foodstall I prefer (there are two at the Brattleboro FM) while she finished up. The one I like is owned by Tuk, the chef at Cafe Lotus. Besides the food at the booth being excellent, Tuk, Pawntip and the third woman usually with them have extraordinary smiles: not just sweet and cheerful like most smiles, but radiant.

As I stood there waiting, the sunlight dappled down through the trees. U felt the heat play on my face,  sometimes shading, sometimes warming it. Ahead of me on line were three girls in their twenties, also deep in conversation. One had long, henna'd hair, a shiny blue-red from which the sun glinted, more colorfully, though no less beautifully, than off that of Traca's silver-haired friend. Another of the three friends had a darling sleepy-eyed baby, quiet, dozing, cradled in a sling made out of a huge fringed orange-and-yellow scarf around her neck.

All around me: people, all ages, all stages. A band with two women vocalists, two guitarists, a banjo player, several  a small self-assured little boy with a toy guitar(Traca later took his picture). "And I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no, not gonna let 'em catch the midnight rider..." sang the women, a cheerful and harmonic version of the old mournful Allman Brothers song. A slim, lovely woman with dark hair in a self-propelled wheel-chair, buying a Thai chicken skewer and sharing it with her daughter, the child nestling her small head in the mother's lap. The smells: herbs from the farmstands, crepes and curry and African stews (brought by a mother and son from Mali), wood-fired pizzas, all mingling. The sounds: occasionally faint sizzles barely audible against the waves of conversations and greetings. Neighbors hailing each other and hugging. Music, children at play calling to each other, their parents calling to them.

It was life, life, life, its own sweet unfolding self.

Quiet for a moment in the midst of all this, I felt for the wonder and strangeness of being here. This version of life is still new to me, utterly different from what I imagined it would be seven years earlier, when Ned was alive. The twinge and ache of his loss, which so often comes up for me still, was there, of course. But by now it is a mild sadness, an inchoate longing, not the overwhelming grief that was my near-constant companion for so long. These days, certainly that day at the Brattleboro Farmer's Market, sadness resides side by side with joy. (Perhaps having my heart cracked open with his sudden death has, in fact, enlarged it, so that opposites can now both inhabit that beating muscle, clenching and unclenching, peaceably?)

And Ned was in a sense with me --- not in the "he's looking down on you" way at all (I have never felt that) but that he was present in me, because who I am is inseparable from who he was and who I became in those 23 years with him. That I was still amused, all those years later, at the very thought and recall of his expression as he said "Towhee!" back when we played Scrabble. (Pictured above left: Me, Ned, and Z-Cat --- Z-Cat is also deceased, now --- taken in 2000, a couple of days before Ned's death, on the front porch of my old home in Eureka Springs, Arkansas... another life for me. Photo, George West.)

Who are we, then? Future ghosts, enjoying the temporary and uncertain privilege of being embodied? And how is it that on that beautiful day, in the midst of all that presence and abundance, plants and food and people and spring, I could feel loss and longing, yet not be saddened by them... feel, instead, deep joy, amazement, appreciation, wonder?  Contradiction is rich, the discovery I make continually; again and yeti again. Each time, it feels new.

"Now", we're told, is all we have. Undoubtedly true. Yet once we reach the age of experience, memory, and forethought, our "now" is informed by "then" and the knowledge of the brevity of our sojourn here.  Curiously, this feels neither morbid nor depressing; rather, "now" becomes all the more luminous for its transience. As I said in an earlier post about transparency, more light shines in and out.

Traca joined me on the Thai line, and we eventually received two gorgeous plates of Thai food, mine  vegetarian, hers non-v. We were both very happy with the fresh, spicy, herbal, hot flavors that make Thai cuisine absolutely sui generis. (I especially loved an ugly but hauntingly good "tofu salad", crumbly white and brown.) And there was the delectable presence of the no-way-is-it-local coconut in some of the dishes. Though of course it was local, in one sense, because there it was, after all, in Brattleboro, Vermont, cooked and served by Tuk and Pawntip who had somehow --- I don't know now, but am sure  the particulars are fascinating and fraught, as are the stories of all immigrants and exiles --- made their way from Thailand. To right there, right then.

As I had. As Traca had. As David was doing, at that moment, aboard a Southwest Airlines flight from Los Angeles, California, to Hartford, Connecticut. 

As all of have traveled, uniquely and universally, from somewhere to somewhere else.

In the town I used to live in, occasionally I'd see a self-righteous bumper-sticker that infuriated me with its ignorant mean-spiritedness. "All of us here are NOT tourists!" it proclaimed. Well, duh: talk about patently obvious. And so hostile! And ignorant of Economics 101: how come Eureka Springs remained relatively pristine, without a chicken processing-plant and a 24-hour-a-day Wal-Mart SuperCenter like nearby Berryville? Because the appreciation of visitors, i.e., tourism, protected it!

But most of all, that bumper-sticker was dumb. We're human beings. We're here so briefly. We're all tourists, or at best, travelers.

My friend, the musician Bill Haymes, introduced me to a Leonard Cohen song called "Passing Through." 

"Passing through; passing through;
sometimes happy, sometimes blue,
glad that I ran into you.
Tell the people
that you saw me
passing through."

Bill, who is now passing through Paris. If Traca is a relatively new friend, Bill is... well, we've been pals since 1975.  Friends of the finish-each-others-sentences variety. Friends of the sometimes-we-don't-even-need-to-finish, or for-that-matter-even-begin some of those sentences variety. ( Here's a picture of him, taken by David in my kitchen here in Vermont, a few months back. Note the typical quizzical, smart-ass, slightly skeptical expression.) God, I love my friends. Go check out Bill's blog, Your Man in Paris.   

David would arrive safe and sound around 1:00 am that night (technically, the morning of the next day, but it's not morning to me until I get up). Traca was asleep by then and I dozing, but I woke up enough to greet him and be delighted that he was back, fix him a plate of homemade split-pea dahl and some Fair Trade Thai rice of a wild purple color. A dab of yogurt and one of some homemade chutney. And we caught up, and for once left the dishes (a radical break in my household protocol)  and then went upstairs to bed... I had put clean sheets on, the crisp cotton summer linens, as opposed to the warmly napped winter flannels...

That was Saturday. Sunday David gardened, I cooked and did battle with a huge stand of rhubarb, Traca helped with the rhubarb, cooking, compost-taking-out, plus ran out to Saxtons River for sugar and Pam spray. At twilight, the three of us went to a potluck to which I brought the rhubarb crisp and buttermilk ice cream Traca and I had prepared. The buttermilk ice cream, in particular, was very well-received.

"Do you know most of these people?" Traca asked me, gesturing around the gathering. "Nope," I told her, thinking about how in Eureka Springs I would have known every single one of them, and their kids, and their dogs, and their dogs' astrological signs. The fact that you only pass from youth to maturity once, if you're lucky in one place with one person (as I did with Ned, in Eureka Springs) is certainly bittersweet. I am in one way less rooted here. In another, I'm liberated from the corral of expectations, of those who, because they think they know about you, may not in fact know you. (Picture, left, taken by David during the cornbread tour at an event when I was visiting my former home town last December, held at the Old Stone Church , aka the Gavioli Chapel... me with two old friends in Eureka who DO know me; Barbara Kellogg, aka Farletta Farquardt, and darling Debbie Dye, who may know me too well. You can see we're not having much fun.)

Today, Monday, they left for the airport in Hartford, Traca to return to Seattle, David to work in Alexandria, Virginia where he'll be filming until Wednesday, when he'll return to Vermont. (More yeti-sized carbon footprints. But hey, even in An Inconvenient Truth, what was Al Gore doing but going airport to airport with his rollaway bag, poignant, spreading the message? You do the best you can, and something is always better than nothing.)

I sent them off with a breakfast of eggs scrambled with fiddleheads (a basket full of fiddleheads, left, from the farmer's market, snapped by Traca on Saturday), and Parmesan cheese. Since I was inexplicably out of fresh bread, I made a sort of improvised hashed-brown/stove-top stuffing to go with it:  sauteed onion, a fresh tomato this early from Micheal Collin's miraculous Vermont garden (how that guy extends the season is beyond me) with some chunks of some excellent wholegrain-y artisanal bread I had toasted dry and stashed in the freezer).

After they'd left for the airport, I ate the leftovers fiddlehead scrambled and hashed brown-style bread, sitting out on the screen porch (the screen porch is pictured left, but with Very Lemony Cornmeal Poundcake from The Cornbread Gospels, and hot tea, and cosmos from the garden last summer, and blue lustreware inherited from my old, long-deceased Arkansas friend, Virginia Carey, may she rest in peace and feistiness, as she lived. Again, presence and absence, side by side, inextricable. David took this picture). The view from the screen porch spreads out, on a clear day like today, twenty-some miles, clear into New Hampshire. And on days like this morning, so extremely fresh and clear, the air fragranced with the lilac in full bloom, Edna St. Vincent Millay's line echoes in my head: "Inebriate of air am I."

Then, after breakfast, I went out into the bright, now much quieter, morning. I had intended to go back to sleep but the garden and the seedlings were calling. I put eighteen of the assorted lettuce starts I had bought at the farmer's market into the ground, plus seven eggplants. Albert had tilled that garden earlier in the week; David, the day before, had laid out rows and made furrows. And of course Aunt Dot (as taken by David, last fall) --- still in the hospital, but, after a scary downturn, was finally on a liquid diet and tentatively scheduled to return home later this week --- she had had the foresight to buy the farm in the first place.

And I thought then, and think now, that we are always and never alone as we make our way on this spinning green earth.