Rose posted a photo today and something inside me stirred. A gentle stirring. Like the butterfly tickly flutters of a new baby growing inside. Can you photograph sunshine? She did. A big bowl of sunshine. Yellow pear shaped. Perfect round and cherry red. A photo of sunshine in red and yellow packages. A bowl full of beautiful tomatoes from her Colorado garden.
Maybe it’s some latent farmer love. A longing for dirty hands and a ripe harvest. Perhaps that bowl of tomatoes awakened something deep in my Northern Hemisphere genetic roots. Harvesting a yummy bowl of tomatoes in August just make sense to me. Back to school and the height of the harvest season = August. Back to school and ripe tomatoes = January? That hasn't quite stopped feeling weird.
My vision swirled. As it will with me. There were raised-box gardens and greens and zucchini and tomatoes and Steve and I mulling over the best way to fertilize. There were chickens and flowers and I had on gardening gloves. There were canning and fermenting and preserving jars all stacked up on shelves in basements. Kate and I cooking. Scotty and the boys eating corn on the cob on the back deck. Years seemed to spin and swirl around me and all of the visions they contained were in a backyard. In Colorado. And it didn't feel weird.
A garden. One that grows in the ground. Instead of pots and boxes that can be easily moved. Tending plants I wasn't thinking would reach their full potential with my friends and neighbors, but with me. At my house. For a long time.
It felt like something I could enjoy. Planting. Harvesting. Planting. Harvesting. These are things one does when one stays. When one isn't leaving soon. When one enjoys the movement of season into season into season into season. I could picture jars in the pantry and bags in the freezer. Things to enjoy throughout the year. These are the actions of a stay-er. Hmmmm…staying. I could try that for a while. Especially if it meant bowls of sunshine every August.
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