Garden

Earthing

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Warmth and sun, oh how I need it.  I have slid the cover of the moonroof back on my car.  My commute this morning should be glorious.  The window itself is closed but light will flood the car. 

Oh, how my pineal gland needs the stimulation. Homemade vitamin D coursing through my body.  I will almost be able to hear the birdsong off in the woods as I rumble down the interstate. I will take the exit through the park today to check out the gardens and trees of the rich folk.  I expect daffodils and redbud and pear.  Perhaps the dogwood will be starting. 

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The Great Beet Adventure of 1981

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Don’t even think about feeding me a beet.  It’s not going to happen. 

Tom Robbins is a favorite author of mine. Tom thought highly of beets.  Let me just quote him for a moment:

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

Jitterbug Perfume, Tom Robbins

Yes, Tom thought highly of beets. 

Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash

So did my father, I think.  Although I don’t remember ever seeing him eat a beet before that fateful summer.  He may have initially planted them for my mother who liked pickled beets.  Which are, arguably, the worst of all the beets.

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Evergreen

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Appalachia was in the greening.  That time in early spring when the green leaves on the trees were so slight, so new, so small, that they were more of a green haze than a green bower.

The greening on this April day was superb.  The sky was the blue of a robin’s eggs with air so clear and so clean it was like Thanksgiving crystal before the feast.

With the revival of the garden, the greening, came the realization that winter was over.  Happiness flooded Charlotte’s heart.  On her knees, she pulled weeds from around the irises, making room for the hollyhocks to begin their biannual ascent.  “I am blissful,“ she said aloud.  She grinned though there was no one in the garden to see her or hear her.  

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