This Sunday the Corrales Grower’s Market resumes. My yard is greening, the lilacs, tulips and grape hyacinth are in bloom. The apple tree is bright white.
Now that spring is more than just a date, I am ready to resume talking about life, about food, about the little farm (such as it is) and the challenges of living both as an urban professional and a weekend farmer.
Look for new recipes, announcements of new arrivals, and a little commentary about life in the world at large.
Post recipes, talk about gardening, my patients, neurology, communication, politics and religion, salt and pepper. A little simple reflective blogging on the nature of things. Seems good.
The chickens and the guinea fowl are grown now. The guineas are named Thing 1 and Thing 2 (there are 17 of them). The chickens are setting, do not disturb. The geese suffered in a late winter coyote raid, and we have one young female who is grieving the loss of her companion. We will bring home a gosling in her breed in a few days.
The fruit trees made it past the last frost and I believe we will have pears, apples and plums this year.
It is officially the season of fresh food, and I will post new recipes at a more reasonable hour.
Drat.
My brain’s gone walkabout again.
Don’t know where, exactly. When I look inside my own head, I see mostly fog.
Maybe it’s the new year making me fuzzy (August is my new year).
The chickens, geese and keets seem more important than writing.
I can’t seem to get enough sleep.
Maybe it’s the weather.
Maybe it’s my disorganized office.
Maybe it’s my hormones.
Maybe it’s astrological.
Maybe it’s nothing at all.
I’ll be back when I’ve got something to say. Or when my office is clean.
Whichever comes first.
(Cross-posted from Cuentos – at Laurie’s suggestion.)
This would be the post in which I whine about my pathetic life, with violin music in the background.
Well, no not really. Maybe just a little in the beginning.
To date: I had a wearying and self-absorbed three weeks at a new job (with benefits) and thought I was going to suffocate or go mad. So much like an assembly line, a sweat shop, so rote, so . . so . . so wrong for me.
I am a free-range chicken, apparently.
I’ve gone back to private practice. Back to the road. Back to my free-wheeling, take your chances contract life.
In other news:
Mrs. BC and I went to the Jemez last weekend for our anniversary and enjoyed it mightily. Friday was my last day at the new/old job, Saturday was the first anniversary since our lovely wedding last summer in Quebec and the 11th since our first ceremony.
We slept a bit and made good food and had massage and tubs at the hot springs. Then we went shopping and picked out jewelry for each other from the street vendor outside of the biker bar on the main street in Jemez.
We played Scrabble and read cheap romance novels. We had bacon lettuce and tomato sandwiches for lunch.
The massage I had on the third day was the best. The massage therapist directed me to visualize my “happy place” and I, being quite malleable after three days of soaking, napping and lying around, immediately saw my own front yard, from various angles. The grape vines, the honeysuckle, the rose of sharon, the hollyhocks. The barns, the willow tree, the cottonwood, the geese marching solemnly, wings tucked back hasidim-wise, nodding their heads thoughtfully.
What a marvelous thing, how fortunate we are, my wife and I, to live in our own happy place. How lucky I am to be able to turn around and walk right back to my previous work, without even missing a step. How lucky the two of us to have found each other.
No woe allowed. I am too damn lucky.
When I was a kid, I had a friend named Kitty. She was Dutch, and had a glass eye. This worked in favor of our friendship, since I was slightly funny looking too, but mostly okay in the ways that count when you are a kid. I think her mom must have worked outside the home, because when I went to her house after school a few times, it was always just the two of us. This was Kitty’s favorite after-school snack:
How to prepare: Take one slice of bread, spread first with Miracle Whip, then with Marshmallow Creme. Cover with sprinkles. Put second slice on top. Squish flat. Wash down with chocolate milk.
I wonder if this was a mom-sanctioned snack. I can’t imagine that it was. I can say for sure that it was a memorable recipe, if nothing else.
Sometimes it seems to me there are no more than 9 minutes left in every day for writing and me I am not a linear or even a terribly productive person.
Yet I would say that a remarkable number of things do get done, in spite of my disinclination to do them. My friend Donna (who went, with her husband, to witness for us in Quebec) says that I am the most driven person she’s ever known.
This both baffles and flatters me (flaffle? blatter?), until I review, compare and contrast where we started, she and I as teenage runaways, hitchhiking from Las Cruces to Los Angeles without a single useable clue as to what we were doing or where we were going.
And somehow, even though I was patently less practical, more “at risk” than Donna (apologize for the quotes) by temperament and background, yet and still I kept going and going like an energizer bunny with chronically low batteries and somehow ended up with a bazillion years of education and surprising adventures and who woulda thunk it? Maybe the absence of a safety net had something to do with it? Yep, that’s me, up by the bootstraps and all.
Which is to say something like, how exactly did I get here?
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Trees for the forest 