The Many Calls on a Food Explorer-Photographer-Story Worker’s Time

Za'atar

I’m getting up earlier and earlier and falling into bed later and later, but I feel lucky, not stressed out.  Early mornings I write, check out the world through social media, do research, then I take the first stroll through the dawn-lit gardens with coffee and camera.  I decide on the day’s harvesting and preserving needs, plantings and weedings.  I try to take an hour or so to shoot photos.  If the weather is fine, I spend the rest of the morning in the gardens, interspersed by stirrings at the stove, shifting of trays in the dehydrator, stringing of ristras.  If it is rainy, I write, I work on recipes, I attend to the business side of things. Nice afternoons I try to get on my bike for a quick 25 miles then attend to storytelling work as things bubble on the stove.  Evenings I  spend time with my family, cooking together, playing, talking.  Later I try to read books that teach me something about writing, thinking, living–I read fiction.

Many days I do not venture forth from the land except on my bike. To have the world through my computer and the earth under my fingernails is amazing.

Late Meal

Today I managed to pull together some recent images over at Open View Photos.  Tomorrow I will post a new article here.  The gardens will need something.  The young rabbit will need shooing. Soon the fall will wend its way more emphatically into the day than is now–yes, the baby bunny is now an adolescent; the swallows have vanished from the electric lines; yes, I feel the days shortening and the air releasing its humidity, but I can choose to turn my face and thoughts to the summer still and will continue to do so for as long as possible!

UPDATE:  After I wrote that bit, I went out to the gardens to plant fall transplants that will eventually be snugged under tunnels as I see how deep into November (even December?) I can grow food here.  As I dug, shook roots out and settled the basil, the summer squash, the chard into their new beds, I was nagged by the thought that this post sounds as though I am without care in the world. That all is well.  But how can that be with much of Pakistan under water and displaced?  With Haiti still reeling?  With New Orleans picking up the pieces?  How can that be when climate change and its twin, overpopulation (I cannot for the life of me understand why people–really wonderful and brilliant people–choose to have so many children when the U.S. squanders so much of the earth’s resources and contributes so profoundly to climate change), are propelling much of the earth to such catastrophe.  And I sit in my garden and wonder how much I can grow in a time of such careening of weather events.  Food for thought indeed.