To End a Week

I just have to share a couple more sections from The Dirty Life that had me laughing out loud. I actually had to read these out loud to the handsome fella, who, even more surprisingly, actually laughed. It is rare we find the same things funny, but she has really got a knack for the ridiculous things we all do when we’re starting farms.

We filled in the days and weeks with our ambitions, which even then we must have known were too big to be contained in the boundaries of a single year. The first week in February was reserved to FIGURE OUT GREENHOUSE- BUILD IT! In the second week of that month, we would aim to BUILD DISTRIBUTION AREA and also, somehow, cut and split the next year’s FIREWOOD. The day in October when we planned to get married Mark had written WEDDING, and below that, on the same day’s square, 50 CHICKS ARRIVE. The letters were the same size, and the only thing that set the first event apart from the second was a pair of conjoined hearts. The following week he had written HONEYMOON and also, neatly, EXTRACT HONEY from the hive.

If it had been left up to me, we would have grown one of everything from the catalogs that year. In the winter squash section alone, I underlined twelve intriguing varieties… The herb sections made me completely nuts. How could you not order one packet each of saltwort, sneezewort, motherwort, and Saint-John’s-wort, plus a sample of mad-dog skullcap, which the text said was once a folk remedy for rabies? The whole trick of seed catalogs is that they come into the house in winter, when everything still seems possible and the work of growing things is too far in front of you to be seen clearly. Luckily, Mark knew this and had quietly retrieved my list and crumpled it up, so the box that arrived at our door contained the seeds of edible things that are generally liked by humans, a reasonable number of varieties, and nothing that ended in wort.

And some pictures of the current state of things, just to end the week. You’ll notice I’ve long since given up on posting pictures of what we’re eating. It’s because we’re not eating much. We put as many vegetables as we can in the giant frying pan and that’s dinner. Sometimes we make rice. No, what we’re concerned with right now is this: