Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Depth of Summer

This has got to be my favorite time of year. The kids and I take off here and there for trips to swimming holes..or hiking trails on the BRP...or on mini-odysseys to visit old and far-flung friends, where we drink copious amounts of wine (that is me and the "old friends" drinking the wine...we don't share it with the kids..), make great pots of pesto pasta and olive bread and talk of days past and yet to come.

The garden runs amok, rife with oversized volunteer pumpkins, surprise tomatoes and whole colonies of harlequin bugs and those cursed Mexican bean beetles that I pad out gleefully in my bare feet to slaughter each evening with nothing but a flat rock and a large-ish piece of mulch or my bare hands.

At this point, I have lost all pretense of hoping for order. The garden is its own being. The once-bare spot where the potatoes where dug up now hosts a weird quilt of bastard onions, tomatilloes, nasturiums, hopi tobacco and herb plants that I thought would die, and thus put out to pasture in this bleak outpost. Somehow, thanks to the August sun and other unknowable blessings, they now are thriving, dark green and musky in the intense sunlight.

I walk out each day at the hottest point, when the kids are fading in the house, plugged into a video or sucking on a popsicle in the shade, and I inhale this fetid chaos...and I smile. This, my friend, is Life.