Open Sesame. Ala Kazam. An incantation. Casting a spell. A strong curse. Abracadabra!* Throwing a hex. There's a reason that magic spells employ rhyme and rhythm. I dare you not to get goosebumps from this YouTube video of Robin Robertson. Happy National Poetry Month. *Bonus factiod: "Abracadabra" can be translated to "As spoken so it shall pass." And that's magic.
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Depression. Ugh. Even the sunniest of us can be ambushed by the chemicals of sadness. Without reason, without season, without warning, the dark tide rushes in and leaves a person clinging to -- or maybe just reclining listlessly on -- a seaweed-covered rock.
I don't know how to recover. I don't understand why it happens or why it goes away. All I can say is, hang on. The tide's going to change. Send up a flare and hang on. The Cornell Cooperative Extension web-based seminar ckasses for agriculture started with "Beginning Farmer 101." Naturally. It was an excellent class. I enjoyed it very much, and was sad to see it end in November. Would-be farmers like me -- having taken the intro -- were encouraged to learn more. We could sign up the following semester for either:
While I might eventually decide to use a Back-Pack for Pesticide Application, I'd just as soon wait before learning my poisons. Does it even bear saying that I would never willingly take a class to explore the Feasibility of any of my Ideas? When exploring the feasibility of my ideas, for crying out loud, I want to end up with a basket of apples, not a plan of action. So, it's Understand the Business, Tax, and Regulatory Implications of Our Farm for me. The first hour of the webinar was devoted to risk management. Farming. Risk. Seriously? Farming IS risk: drought, pests, soft markets, hard soil, bad luck, and plague. Broken fences, floods, hail, wandering livestock, honey-bee collapse, the neighbor's marauding dogs, trespassers -- these few just off the top of my head. Still, my impatience only goes so far. Unlike a lot of beginning farmers, Jeff and I aren't betting the farm -- on the farm. In a rare moment when the tired investment metaphor actually jumps up and does its trick, this eccentric farming endeavor of ours is precisely where the phrase "minimizing one's exposure" nearly makes sense. Most farmers borrow money in an effort to pull dollars from the ground (or pluck pennies from the trees). But Jeff and I aren't starting in an unleveraged position, thankfully. We aren't investing in livestock. We have no plans to sink funds into buildings. We will not be signing mortgage papers for tractors or combines or agitators or seeders. This year's farm budget might touch the lower end of the cost of a busy sailing season -- making our exposure laughably small:
(*The reference is from John Webster's The White Devil. "Stop her mouth with a sweet kiss, my lord. So/ Now's the tide's turned, the vessel's come about./He's a sweet armful. O we curled haired men/Are still most kind to women." Not much related to shovels and loppers and rakes, but I like it anyhow.) The real investment this year will be some hours and sweat and a good chunk of brain-time. We can afford that much. So much happens in the world. My own lawn -- a flat, sandy square with sparse, seasonal grass -- is rich with drama. Lizards defending their turf, ant-lions excavating their circular traps, spiders trapeze-ing around, the odd turtle cruising through. This week, when the sun was out, I happened upon an enormous grub crawling out of the ground. Pale, translucent, squirmy, better than two inches long. I wish I could un-see it. Why was it on the move in the middle of winter? Scientific curiosity muscled aside by revulsion, I flicked it onto the shed roof so that a mockingbird might make a meal of it. I admit the birds' drama interests me most: the chirpy purple martins who return each year (so early! I spotted the first scouts in January), the pair of owls who invaded and occupied a squirrel's nest last year, the mob of raucous crows bedeviling the owls. Crossing the sandy lawn, I spot a mess of feathers by the mailbox: a single flight-feather, big handful of curled coverts, and drifting snowflakes of pale down. The scene is bloodless, but it must have been a massacre. A Cooper's hawk probably, taking a mourning dove at speed. Not to brood on the "nature red in tooth and claw"* character of wildlife, but there's this: What manner of creature stuffed this narrow gap between two channel-markers with the dismembered wings of seagulls? A rogue osprey? An angry human? What other bird-of-prey hunts the open bay?
Was this -- like the fried chicken bones left in a pile along the sea-wall -- the remains of an alfresco picnic? Wings, after all, not being the most nutritious bit of bird? Did someone or somebird perform the dismemberment for vengeance? A bird-feud, a bird-vendetta? Were the wings left as warning? Surely the owners of these wings did not just keel over and land there, did they? I've never seen it a second time, but the mystery haunts me. (*"Nature red in tooth and claw" is a quotation from Tennyson's "In Memorium," a long meditation on doubt and the afterlife.) One of my writing friends, Cath Mason, is a poet. Lest this conjure an image of a clichéd fright speaking in sing-song doggerel about spring flowers, let me assure you: Cath is a good poet. Funny, sharp, clear-sighted. She writes about peculiar and very specific things, such as a baking potato that jumps out of its own skin in the oven, or the octopus in a German zoo that makes a habit of rearranging the furnishings of its tank. Her website is here. She's the kind of person for whom friends clip odd articles from the paper. She dips into esoteric books on quantum physics, fractal geometry, the mating habits of songbirds. Recently, she revealed that she'd learned the answer to this question: "What strange South Asian mammal smells like a batch of fresh-buttered popcorn*?" and that she could imagine creeping through the jungle, sniffing, and saying, "Is someone making popcorn?" (*Answer: the Asian bear-cat.) Cath and I meet for writing sessions when our schedules permit. Sharing a table at a coffee shop and hunching separately over our notebooks, we come up for air and company every few hundred words. One morning, she told me that one of her great and abiding joys was tea and toast. She's from Lancashire, in the northwest of England, which anchors her opinion with a certain gravitas. It was not just the crunch, she said, and the strong flavour of tea (it's hard not to adopt the British spelling to align words with accent), but the moment itself: the house quiet and herself alone with her mug of tea and a piece of toast. I rarely have toast. French toast, yes, of course: as means to a maple end. And of course, toast is the only way to corral a BLT. But toasted slices of bread? Solo? Buttered? That's just crazy indulgent. And yet. Today I found myself watching the toaster-oven do its slow thing: glowing and incinerating invisible crumbs, bending the air with heat. I took a sip of tea and wondered about this imprecise process. Not knowing how the toaster oven -- set midway between "Light" and "Dark" -- would perform, I couldn't let my attention drift. As it is wont to do. It's a vocational hazard for writers, daydreaminess. I would never describe her as ditzy or absent-minded -- still, Cath does seem to save her deepest attention for the things that most catch her interest. Like strange potatoes and jungle creatures that smell of popcorn. Keeping an eye on the untried toaster-oven, I wonder: is close observation part of what brings Cath joy? To be present during the transmogrification of plain bread into something golden and fragrant? While I pondered toast and attention and writers, the toaster oven tried to do its darnedest. The aluminum body barely containing a dragon's instincts to singe and carbonize. I prevailed. The result was lightly toasted, a slice crispy yet tender, with a perfectly melted skimming of something butteresque. It was sigh-worthy. Absurdly gratifying. Perhaps tea and toast is but a minor joy in the wider constellation of wonders stretching around us, still, it deserves its moment of appreciation. |
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