See You in a Hundred Years (or, Maybe Tomorrow)

Riots in Egypt fill the news, and details about the USDA approval of completely unregulated genetically-modified alfalfa fill my in-box.  German trains collide.  A bomb explodes in Moscow.  And the 25-year-anniversary of the Challenger space shuttle explosion takes me back to Wall Street, where I found out about that disaster while huddled around a storefront TV with a crowd of strangers when I was out for my lunchtime walk all those years ago.  My younger daughter tells me her teacher was in kindergarten at the time, in Florida near the launch site, at recess, and watched the death scene as it unfolded in the sky.  I am somehow reminded of this picture one of my daughters created years ago about the Fall of Icarus.

Between these headlines and the thoughts that they provoke, I notice this week it's still light now at 6 PM.  The mint has returned.  The harvests under my hooped and covered garden beds are becoming more frequent and bountiful.  The birds are back, chirping away out there, including that one that says, "Heeeeere.  Heeeeeere.  Spring in heeeeere" (or so it sounds to me).  

The community garden seems to have dodged the bullet and has appeared, in its same location, on the just-released master plan draft for the park in which it is located.  

The greenhouse is producing so much I had to spin the greens in my washing machine to dry since there was too much to dry in a towel on my kitchen counter.  

Expansion plans are in the works at a nearby school garden and the food pantry garden at the church, and the first food pantry seeds have been planted at the Atlanta JCC garden space to which we've recently been granted stewardship (until camp time). 

One garden needs mulching.  Another needs fertilizing.  And, let's not even mention the two pomegranate trees in my garage.  And so there's much to do, and the forecast of a 70-degrees Fahrenheit (21-degrees Celsius) day seems certainly promising.

Yet . . .  

I see the sun streaming through the window, and the book I'm reading laying on the ground, open to the dog-eared page where I nodded off the night before.  Titled See You in a Hundred Years, it's about a couple who left their New York City home and bought a small farm in Virginia, and proceeded to live there for a solid year as if it were 1900.  No electricity.  No car.  No modern conveniences, which means anything that was not in existence at the turn of the last century.  I bought it the last time I stepped into my city's Borders book store, before it closed for good, just weeks ago. And I had been completely enjoying it, finding the story informative, funny, touching, and inspiring, and the writer (Logan Ward) stylistically elegant.

I pick up the book and curl up in the sunshine like a cat.  I finish it, savoring it like the creamy leek sauce I had tossed on pasta the night before, the aroma of which still fills the house.  It feels decadent to do nothing but read on such a gorgeous day, yet I know this moment is fleeting, that the next few weeks will have me digging and planting at least a little every day to maximize our Team Food Pantry potential at spaces scattered all over town.  When I finally emerge to 2011 again, I head outside, the glare of the day hurting my eyes, and my neighbor across the street who had seen me slogging in the garden in the rain and the snow says, "Too nice a day for you to garden?"

I know the sunny and warm days will come soon like the box cars of a speeding freight train, strung together one after another after another.  And I know the headlines will keep bombarding as well.  And so, this moment in time, when the earth is just starting to tremble with new growth, gives me pause. A  moment to be grateful.  To imagine what is possible, and the good that will surely come if I am open to noticing it.

I hear the gentle strumming of my younger daughter's guitar and see her swaying with it on the hammock, and I know she gets it, too, the value of this particular moment.  She doesn't yet see it, as I do, as the simple essence we can borrow from the past to strengthen us for what is yet to come.  She just sees it as nice.

A little later, we head out to Barnes and Noble, the only bookstore now in my 42,000-citizen city.  And I see the new Urban Farm magazine, the one that has my article (and sidebar) in it.  I buy one, head home and take my turn on the hammock.  I lay the magazine on me, and listen to the "Heeeere.  Heeeere.  Spring is heeeeere."  And I fall fast asleep.

See You in a Hundred Years (or, Maybe Tomorrow)