Early this morning, before the cloud disappeared and the shops opened, I walked up to the market to pick up this year’s tomatoes and basil plants. The place was packed–everyone’s pent-up gardening urges popped out this morning with the prediction of hot sunny weekend. More than the usual number of crazy drivers mixed in with people trying to decide about geranium colours and tomato varities. For 10$ I snagged a dozen tomato and a dozen basil bedding plants.
They’re now stuck in soil that’s been getting richer and richer each year with all the the kitchen vegetable waste being composted and turned in along with the occasional bag of manure. I’ve planted them in a different spot in the garden this year; it gets a bit less sun but also doesn’t dry out as quickly. After the first week or so, the plants will be on their own water-wise so the added shade shouldn’t be a huge deal.
In one of the dozens of garage sales popping up I should hunt out an extra bucket since the old pail that has disappeared and we need to make a batch of the foul smelling but very useful comfrey juice to feed the tomatoes. Free, effective fertilizer from a plant that will take over if you you let it.
In a couple of months we’ll be eating tomatoes warm from the vine with shredded basil and goat cheese. All we have to do now is wait.
No particular explanation for this round of radio silence. Day to day life trundles on.
- After seven or eight increasingly annoyed phone calls and emails and one short conversation with the paper carrier, I’ve gotten rid of the wodges of flyers that are delivered to the house each week. This means we should be able to put the paper recycle bin out once a month or less if the paper gets shredded into the compost. And the regular garbage will go out every two weeks. And the bottles, tin cans, and plastic, every two weeks. This means that we’ve reduced the already small amount of garbage we set out by about a half.
- It looks like it’ll be warm enough to plant the vegetable garden this weekend–a late start given last week’s near freezing temperatures. The plan is lots of tomatoes and basil, some peas and beans, and maybe some salad greens. I’d like to try to grow some sort of squash but the squirrels in the neighbourhood love the blossoms and all I’ll get is lots and lots of leaves and vines.
- I’ve passed another prime number birthday, quietly as usual. Followed by a weekend full of relatives young, old, and middling. You can amuse some people with garden twine and chalk. Other people need beer or tea.
- And lastly I’ve started up the scholarly editing project I’ve been dragging around with me for years. I pecked away at it fairly steadily a year or more ago and set it aside. Working on it is always tough for all kinds of reasons but mostly because of my ambiguous status in relationship to the academic world the editing project fits into. I’m long past graduate school, the academic job market, and adjunct labour. And I’m not quite that near mythical creature: the “independent scholar”. The project pulls me back from time to time when my drive to finish what I start is strong. And the project pushes me away from time to time when the task starts to seem enormous and the pleasure of figuring things our and making connections is pushed aside by old grief.
It’s definitely an odd feeling. Odd but familar. I’ve been getting it since I was eight with my first pair of charmless, dorky black plastic glasses (you’d recognize them–their cousins are walking around on a lot of faces these days). I’ve been struggling with nausea and eyestrain for months. A month passed as I figured out the problem was my eyes. Another month before I could get into my eye doctor’s. And it’ll probably be another month by the time that my brand new progressives with their bizarre prescription arrive from Japan.
I never believe my eye doctor when she tells me it’s not that odd to have one eye more than -4, and the other more than -10 not to mention the borderline weird optics needed to make the eyes focus together. Nope never believe her. I’ve seen the scrambling and mad catalogue flipping that happens when I go to buy the glasses and I’ve heard the apologetic totaling up of ferocious cost of the lens alone. And this time the oddness of the prescription was confirmed by the estimate that it would take at least three weeks to get the glasses.
I was unduly excited to get a call this afternoon to tell me that the glasses were in. I ducked out of work early. And was disappointed: my day to day glasses are still on the slow boat from Japan. My reading glasses (a totally self-indulgent luxury) were ready. I’m now officially one of those people who are always looking for a set of glasses. The new reading glasses, which work surprisingly well on my computer screen, are perched on my nose. And the ones I used to only take off in bed or in the shower are sitting around here somewhere. I’ll find them in a minute; right now I just want to sit and admire the new clarity of print.
