Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Lush

The moon is full again. Gerald’s garden can only be described as lush. The recent rains have made everything around us rich with green vegetation.

For dinner tonight, food from the garden included healthy okra (laid on a plate and three minutes in the microwave), sliced yellow zucchini (topped with no calorie spray, seasoning salt, and three minutes in microwave), and sliced tomatoes. Cantaloupe was dessert. Oh, and an ear of the corn from Scott’s patch next door rescued from the deer. Gerald has already taken 5-gallon buckets of tomatoes to the homeless shelter along with zucchini and okra. We’ve shared cantaloupe and veggies with Katherine and an aide, and I suspect we will have to find other recipients very soon. The extremely hot temperatures must be good growing weather.
We received just the right amount of rain last Wednesday here at Woodsong and up at Wayside Farm, where most of Brian’s crops are. Between the two farms, however, along Route 166, the rain came so hard that the ditches were overflowing and the road was covered by water for the first time in all the decades we have lived here. A soybean field there was covered with muddy water. Smoke was everywhere and a fire truck was there as Gerald drove by going to check on Brian’s crops. A large barn full of hay at Doughtys was destroyed, we assume by the lightning.

Geri Ann had taken friends in our car down to Gma Shirley's, and Gerald called her to wait awhile to drive back home because he felt the creek there might be flooding the road. Not so. (Although one neighbor over in that direction reported four inches.) At the Medical Arts Center this morning, where Gerald had a colonoscopy, we ran into Carbondale friends, and they did not get this rain at their home. Their garden has about dried up. Once again the rain had fallen and not fallen on the just and the unjust. But overall, crops in our area are abundant. So are the quail.

Gerald was ordered to take it easy today, and after we had stopped for a delayed breakfast at almost noon, we came on home. I had been recruited to be in the waiting room and to be his driver as required by the doctor. Almost home on our country road, a mama turkey started across followed by a couple of gawky young ones right in front of us and I braked for their crossing. Then another one came after them and finally a fourth. These inexperienced birds were not the least afraid of my car nor were they in any hurry. The last one reversed itself to nibble something in the road and then to poke on across. Finally we started forward and almost missed seeing the father turkey waiting to join them in crossing with three more young ones in the thicket on the right.

When we reached home, Gerald read, snacked, worked with photographs, played on the Internet, talked on the phone, and finally took a long nap in his recliner after only a bit of leaving the house to go down the lane for the mail and to add a cantaloupe to the kitchen counter.

It was late twilight when we finished dinner and he invited me to ride around the farm on the mule. The darkening sky was covered with dark blue clouds mixing with those clouds turned orange and pink by the setting sun. Gerald was hoping to see the huge buck he had seen while riding with Aidan and Maddux. Instead we saw four deer guiltily leaping and fleeing from Scott’s corn field when they saw us riding toward them. They were as fast as the turkeys were slow and could easily outrun us. Gerald left that part of the farm, and soon we saw them again over in the neighbor’s pasture on the north of us.

We continued on around the lake. Green trees were reflected in the water. The overhead sky’s reflection with its gentle pastels of the pink and blue clouds mingled with the greens made the whole scene like one of Monet’s masterpieces. By the time we were back to the shed and had parked the mule, it was dark. I finished up in the kitchen before coming down here to reflect on this summer day.

No comments: