I'm up way too early this morning. There is a difference between getting up early and getting up too early. It seems to revolve Copernicusly around the sun. Getting up at 4:30 in the long summer days means beating the heat, getting things done. All positive life affirming, damn my life is on track stuff. Getting up at 4:30 as the days are growing shorter just means I've been laying in bed mulling, thinking, rethinking life. The body likes action the mind likes thinking. Not much you can do when it's dark outside.
Yeah, having a plan and thinking about what you intend to do with your life is huge in value. Laying in bed mulling and rethinking is just a huge time suck. Youtube offers some comfort and can be done in the dark. (If you keep the volume down and don't wake the wife!) Yet, even a good video with a bit on intentional living though is basically a time suck. Writing seems to be a good bridge between action and thinking for those times when action isn't an option. Thus I write.
The other morning I was jarred awake at 4:30 with a vision of a salad that would incorporate all of the weird gleanings of the October garden. When I say vision I mean it was vivid, like Noah's Ark vivid but without the Cubits. Not much lettuce or spinach but enough to mellow out the abundant arugula and mustard greens. Importantly, not a salad based on the overflow of tomatoes. The bitter greens need a different sweetness with apples and some Asian Pears. The Asian Pears were a gift from Maxine who brings me grass clippings and leaves from her lawn care business but also has her own backyard Eden. It was 4:30 so I didn't hit the garden to begin picking mustard greens by the moonlight. (Not quite ready to explain to the neighbors I had a salad vision - I mean Noah at least was working on something to save humanity - We're talking salad here!) I did check the fridge. We had 3 small apples I had collected on a recent trip but they were being saved for the seeds. The Asian Pears were down to one sad brown forgotten fruit. The Ark salad would not be built! Oddly, later that day Deb would help a neighbor empty her apple tree and returned with 10 gallons of fruit but nobody (except Maxine) grows Asian Pears and it was past their season.
I don't have a clean segue into this but wanted to share a thought that occurred to me while shaving (action - Yeah!) I've been trying to use an old drunks sobriety trick to get myself out of the funk of this last year I seem mired in. "Do the next good thing." The "trick" part of it is to not think of it as a quid pro quo or start saying "OK I did my good thing and what do you God/the universe have as my reward". Just do the next good thing.
Mrs Du, Kim, is a neighbor 3 houses down whose late husband was a gardener. Language was always an issue as they are ethnic Chinese from Vietnam. Communication was of the primitive sort with me doing lots of pointing and gesticulating. We became neighbors when Deb and I held an 'annual cookout' for the neighborhood a decade ago, we've been too busy to repeat it. It was a beautiful intentional act both worth repeating and sad that we didn't. Mr Du was the gardener but Kim was the brave one who came to the cookout even though she knew language was going to be hell. She came with her English speaking daughter who didn't live with them and both seemed to appreciate the opportunity for Kim to meet neighbors. I can only imagine the isolation of living in a neighborhood but without the ability to interact beyond a wave with your 'neighbors'.
Part of the cookout was me being a proud gardener and showing folks around my garden. Kim and her daughter enthusiastically walked with me around a garden no better than Mr Du's as I encouraged Kim to smell this and taste that. With Shawn's help I ended up sending her home with a small rooted piece of oregano in an old plastic pot.
It might have been the next day or a week later I don't recall but Kim showed up at our door with a bag of produce. Beautiful things carefully bundled and in a very loud red bag with Chinese iconography. I would learn over the next few years that the Du family, or at least Kim, was pathologically unable to not reciprocate a gift from the garden. God forbid that in August I should take some of the teeming pile of misshapen fruit or veggies, that I could no longer stand looking at on the kitchen counter, and drop a bag by the Du's. Like some sort of pyramid scheme promise a bag plus would inevitably return. Some overgrown lettuce in a plastic grocery bag out. Beautiful just so multicolored leaf lettuce and perhaps a perfect bundle of herbs returned, and of course the red bag. Handed if she could catch me or hung on the door. I even caught her daughter visiting and explained she didn't have to reciprocate sometimes I just had too much. She laughed and said her brothers and sisters all joked about visiting their folks and returning with a weeks worth of groceries. The message might have been shared but you don't change pathological.
All of this back and forth of produce reached something of a zenith with a shark fin melon. It was the size of a watermelon and arrived in the hands of Kim's daughter with of course a red bag alongside. The daughter explained all of the ins and outs of the melon that it was more a squash and used in making a very special (vegetarian) version of Shark Fin soup. Most importantly she explained that her Dad was quite proud of having grown it. If this was a contest it was pretty much game over. Big, beautiful, exotic - the blue ribbon goes too... Funny thing is, dives into the internet proved there really was only one thing to do with this melon, make veggie shark fin melon soup. The soup required about a thousand steps and never got made. The melon simply cooked was bland and full of seeds and generally just not worth the effort to cook, but still exotic. So I save some seeds.
After I heard of Mr Du's death I brought by some veggies and tried to gesticulate my condolences. The red bag, of course, was hanging on our door two days later. I realized in unpacking it that the lettuce inside was store bought and as Kim didn't drive I knew I needed to be more careful. A gift no matter how well intentioned can be a burden, especially for a nice old lady.
Skipping forward to this spring and my own pathological nature. I was organizing my seeds and trying to get rid of extras and old ones. I came across the shark fin melon seeds. Yeah I knew I was never going to grow 'em but I couldn't toss 'em either. I mean the garden beds were already scripted there was really no room and certainly not for something I didn't plan to eat. Well almost, there was this one worthless spot I'd piled some scraps of garden debris, too hard to water and shaded all but the morning. OK, so I'd stick the seeds in there. Live, don't, it would be fate's problem. If the melons grew I wouldn't have to eat it I could give Mrs Du the fruit in homage to her late husband. My pathological seed saver needs would be met and the pile of seeds reduced, if only by one.
Nothing, nothing, Oh wait something but just leaves. More leaves and more leaves but not a blossom in sight and the growing season is running short. Bloody hell the thing is climbing the wild plum bushes that I hate ... and wait what is that hanging there. OK, but it will never get to size it's September, a freeze could happen any day but I'll give it a little water. Well September turned to October and the weather this last full week will finally catch up to the calendar. So into a red bag went the little brother with the bigger melon placed on the stoop with a note explaining that these were from that shark fin melon Mr Du had grow years before.
Yeah you guessed it, two days later I'm in the backyard and Cooper starts barking. Kim and her daughter are coming from the front, red bag in tow. We walked the garden with her daughter explaining some of the backstory on the melon and how her father had come to have the seeds. I show them the horrible place by the alley I had given the melon to grow. The bag was passed and in it, store bought but beautifully packaged Asian Pears and of course something extra.
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