a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Category: Reflections

Who Made My …?

It all started a few months ago when I purchased two teacups at my local Skagit Valley Food Co-op. I liked them so much that the next time I was at the co-op, I asked one of the staff if they had a way to contact the Cheryl Harrison whose signature was on the bottom of the teacups.

“Yes, she works here,” they said. Wow! That surprised me. I found out which days and hours she worked, and I met her and asked if she made pottery on request. She did, and I took some pottery that I liked and gave her the sizes of the cups, plates, and bowls that I wanted.

I picked them up this week. It’s a delight having handmade dishes and knowing the person who made them. Each cut, plate, and bowl is slightly different. It’s refreshing setting the table and having pieces with personality.

It’s made me think how much we’ve lost with everything being mass produced, with everything being identical. A couple hundred years ago, you knew everyone who made your clothes, your dishes, your furniture. It was either yourself, or someone in your town. Today, most people have no personal connection with the people who made the things they use every day; their clothes, their shoes, their dishes, and the many other things they use.

One thing I’ve learned being at Bow Little Market this summer, is that if I look around, there are people nearby who make many of the things I use every day. It’s nice having a bowl of warm soup and knowing the person who crafted your bowl, and when I’m tossing a salad, knowing the person who made my salad fork and spoon. And they aren’t people who live in some far distant town, state, or country. They live nearby.

October 30, 2015
Trees on Fire

The trees are on fire. When the sun is out, where is the heat coming from? The sun? Or the trees and their burning leaves?

Every day there are more white flower beans to pick. I never tire of popping open the bean pods and seeing the large white beans.

The horse chestnut leaves are yellowing. They look like dancers in the gentle breeze.

It’s a morning for olive-green-pink eggs and ham. Why settle for white eggs when eggs come in so many colors?

October 24, 2015
Drama by the Road

Why do you ride a bicycle? I get that question a lot. There are the obvious reasons like exercise and environment. I bicycle for those and other reasons, like being able to stop on a dime when I see something interesting. I also get to help people. They often stop and ask for directions. It’s tempting to direct them to places where they aren’t planning on going. I don’t, but it’s tempting. It wouldn’t be cruel. Life is more exciting when you’re lost and have no idea where you are, and you’re wondering why that old man on that bicycle sent you this way. Maybe he was a sign.

But I also bicycle for the drama. A few days ago I came across a handful of pregnancy tests tossed on the side of the road. Who does that? Why would anyone toss used pregnancy tests out the window of a car?

Looking down at those pregnancy tests was like staring into a play by Shakespeare. I could see it, a frantic woman, distraught by the results of the test, flees her house, her husband in hot pursuit. Flying over the country road, she throws the pregnancy tests out the window when she sees her lover’s name pop up on her cell phone. Or a high school girl, needing to hide the results of the test, tosses them from the school bus on the way home. The possibilities are endless.

Pedal your way along country roads and you see the fragments people discard of their lives as they drive on by. It’s like coming across snippets of Shakespeare lying on the grass.

There’s drama in a compost pile too. It had cooled down, and before I carried it off to the garden, I checked it under the microscope. I found billions of bacteria, protozoa, amoebae, hyphal fungi, and nematodes. Lots of nematodes. Watching nematodes is high drama. They slither through the bacteria and fungi, looking for food while being hunted by large, carnivorous nematodes. Nematodes are so numerous, it is estimated that by number, they represent 80% of all animals on the earth. That’s dramatic. This is good, vibrant compost, full of living organisms which plants need to grow.

Few vegetables are as dramatic as cabbage. They are the drama queens of the garden with bold, green, sweeping leaves. If you want dramatic plants that make a statement, grow cabbage.

October 20, 2015
Bamboo Harvest

It’s the great bamboo harvest of 2015. A massive pile of bamboo. If it weren’t for bamboo, civilization may never have started. Such a versatile plant. It doesn’t take a lot of bamboo to make a cozy, dry house. You can make bridges out of it, fishing poles, water pipes, spears, clothes, bowls, cups, baskets, all the things you need to be civilized.

The chickens come to investigate what I am doing with all this bamboo. Tangerine brings her chicks to show them how civilization started. You never know. Ingrained in DNA, passed down through the eons, may be terrifying memories of those first chicken cages made from bamboo. Chicken learning may be a matter of firing memories stored in DNA. One walk past a human taking apart bamboo, and the terrifying memories of being trapped inside bamboo cages come alive and the chickens walk a little bit faster. Don’t get too close to a human with bamboo their DNA tells them. Never fear, little ones. You live in the land of chicken freedom. There’ll be no bamboo cages for you today.

The bamboo harvest over, it’s on to the smallest cabbage harvest in the world, plucking one cabbage for lunch and a few meals. In cool weather, cabbage is one of those fantastic plants that stays fresh as long as you leave it growing. It would be stupid to harvest all the cabbages at once. They’d never keep. I’d have to turn them into sauerkraut, can them, pickle them, etc, or see them turn into compost. Leave them out in the garden, and I can have fresh cabbage next week, the week after, the week after that, and on and on. It’s cool when the soil does a better job keeping produce fresh than a refrigerator. Try keeping a head of cabbage fresh for four weeks in your fridge. It’s not going to happen. Leave it growing in the ground, and it’s a piece of cake.

October 19, 2015
Leopard in the Woods

There’s an intriguing log at the edge of the woods, a fallen alder with leopard spots. I can’t decide what the spots are. A fungus perhaps? They’re curious. They’re on the log where the bark has peeled off. The other alders that lie slowly decomposing don’t have these mysterious black spots. Could it be alder leopard disease and this is the first alder in the universe to catch it? Whatever it is, it’s not contagious. I’ve touched it many times and my skin has no spots. Maybe I need to lie in the woods for days and days for my skin to become spotted.

This time of year, the produce looks more beautiful each day. When the garden finally stops producing, it will be sad to have to buy vegetables in the store. They’re not the same once they are more than a few hours out of the ground or off the plant. Hopefully, that won’t happen until December, or if the winter is mild, maybe never this winter.

October 18, 2015