A GOOD IDEA
What Sweetheart has told me about Florida weather, when she lived there as a young woman for a short time, was rain or thunderstorms would come out from the day, each day, like clockwork, at 4PM. Which reminds me how my mother used to visit her Irish parents in their basement apartment and I was often with her, right at this hour, and they would all sit and visit around the kitchen table with a pot of tea. Quite British for these devoted northern Irish Protestants. I was a little boy and everything looked large and wholesome in these few small rooms.
The month of May has been enriched and damaging. Killer frost has done much of the damage. Apple blossoms, flowers, whole crops. They say the apple crop may have been almost completely ruined. I don’t want to imagine Vermont without apples. Even the hardy oaks, up and down the river valley, burnt-leaf from the frost. Somehow Sweetheart planted lettuce and encouraged it to grow during this rough cold so we have it in our salads each day. Her green thumb. Plus she has a method of planting right in composted leaves and debris, and it all looks ragged and unpretty when gazing over such gardens. It looks like a brilliant unkempt. In that debris little plants crowd together their strength to grow, sheltered from the storm.
from A Possible Eden, Bob Arnold, Longhouse 2010
photo: © Bob Arnold
