I was walking from Pastor Toni's birthday celebration back to the garden with Jeremy today. He stopped to tie his shoe and I waited, and still waited after he told me I could go on ahead. He thanked me for my patience and I wondered out loud if there were scissors at the garden for cutting lettuce for the salad we wanted to make for the party. Jeremy knew that there were, and I said that I like that he always knows where things are and he returned that he likes that I am patient. I've been hearing that a lot lately, about patience--from children and adults. And that is rarely how I feel. There is so much to do, but there is so little good that comes from rushing, particularly in gardening.
Today I rushed to wash off a glass gallon jar of fresh milk and I broke it in my porcelain sink. That was all of Myrtle and Flair's milk from this evening. Yesterday I left a roll of chicken wire in the new coop, and today when I stopped home for lunch I heard a chicken ruckus. A biddie was stuck head and wing in the wire and was getting a nearly fatal lesson in the pecking order from the big girls. The little one is recovering in her box on the book shelf, looking like a vulture with her defeathered, scabby neck, and now the remaining two have a properly fenced area of their own, safe from those from whom they cannot protect themselves yet.
Life requires attention, and attention requires patience.
It has been a busy spring, as usual. We've been working on building a pizza oven in the garden out of found materials. Another exercise in patience. Hauling concrete rubble from neighboring yards; sand and clay from a construction site down the street; more sand from the banks of Sugar Creek where it crosses under Arkwright. And then sifting the clay and sand, and making mortar out of it, mixing to the perfect consistency with bare feet. And placing the stones and concrete just so around the rubble-filled tires to build the foundation. And leveling the brick for the oven floor. In the book it says you can build one in a couple of days. We're not going by the book anymore.
In the midst of oven building the redbuds bloomed like pink popcorn. I mentioned to fellow builders that the flowers are edible, and tasty. Some concurred and some did not, and one became a redbud aficionado, who tasted flowers from every redbud we passed in our forays for materials. He noticed that each tree has a different flavor, and decided that the one in the garden tastes best. That tree was stripped clean of all flowers within reach, which he nibbled directly from the pulled-down branches. We ordered pizza for lunch as the oven was still in progress, and he topdressed his slice with a layer of redbud flowers.
Just beyond the redbud tree, the rye grass and clover that got seeded out in January is a few inches high now, struggling along in the heavy clay, and now where ever I dig there are worms. Sometimes people tell me they think the garden is abandoned because they never see people working there, and I feel like I haven't done my job well enough. But it has taken 4 months for the grass to grow a few inches. Reclaiming this site will require even more patience than I have yet doled out. And I am hopeful.
Last weekend at the neighborhood potluck in the garden, a woman came who grew up down the block. Her granddaddy farmed the land that is now the garden and the middle school, and she remembers being on his farm. The land will remember what it once used to do, and as we patiently call it back to its past purpose, it will pull us in the right direction toward the future we are beginning to allow ourselves to imagine.
