My son discovered it when he was nine.
He found it, tucked beneath the bills and the Christmas cards, among
the pleas for donations, the community newspaper and the thick stack
of circulars from the grocery stores. It really should have been
wrapped in brown paper.
My son. My pure, innocent son. He
tossed the mail on the table and disappeared with it. I found it
later, in my son's bedroom, lying on the floor amid a stack of books
and a Lego set under construction. Its pages were dog-eared and
wrinkled. The centerfold had been pulled out.
"This is mine," I said. "What
are you doing with it?"
He grinned.
"You marked in it."
He grabbed the centerfold and opened it
up. "Look."
Heirloom garlic and beans of all
sorts...tomatoes...celery...basil.
"Where,"I asked him, turning
the page of my favorite seed catalogue, "are we going to put
three apple trees?"
He grinned over the top of his crooked
glasses.
I grinned back.
* * *
Every winter, my father would get
restless, forlornly staring out the window, hoping for a good
snowfall so he could get out the tractor and begin plowing the drive.
When the snow did come and the driveway was clear, he'd watch out the
front window, waiting for someone to get stuck on the road so he
could pull them out with a chain. And, when the day's chores were
done, he would spend hours sitting in his easy chair, football game
on low, planning the spring garden, as if, by this act of setting his
vision on paper, he could rush the season along. He looked through
his seed catalogues, dog-earing pages that piqued his interest,
making a long list on a yellow legal pad: carrots, corn, beans,
broccoli, peas, spinach, tomatoes…
“God is in the details,” he would
say, as he carefully filled in the order blanks and sketched out that
year’s layout. Then he impatiently watched at the window, waiting
for the UPS man's delivery that announced the arrival of spring.
Today, I give up my CSA. For ten years,
my family has participated in a farm subscription, paying anywhere
from six- to twelve hundred dollars for two seasons of fresh, local,
organic produce. I loved my CSA. I loved picking cherry tomatoes and
eating them–warmed by
the sun–right in the
field. I loved watching the sunflowers grow. I loved talking with the
farmers and working our required eight hours: weeding, rolling out
straw to keep weeds down, blindly reaching into lovely, loose soil in
search of potatoes.
But now that we've moved, I've decided:
This is the year to go it alone.
Today is the day I give up as much
reliance as possible on others–grocery
stores and CSAs–to feed
my family.
Today I plan my garden.
I dig out my seed catalogues, pick up
my legal pad, and begin to dream.
God is in the details and spring is
only eleven weeks off.
Kelly Garriott Waite on Google+
Labels: Great 365 Day Purge