dual personalities

This year, thanks to a friend, I got the opportunity to revive an abandoned vegetable garden in the vast and beautiful back yard of a sweet 93 year old lady, who attends our church and is an experienced gardener. She gave some good advice. Neither of us (the friend and I) had ever done any gardening before so we plunged in with a mix of trepidation and “let’s just see what happens” attitude. With the help of our darling children (son #2 and his girlfriend) we spent some grueling time digging up the weeds and preparing the ground — this was the hardest part. Then we planted lettuce, peppers, broccoli, herbs, tomatoes, eggplants, and squash and sat back to see what would happen.

First we got this.

Stage 1 doesn’t look that great what with the anti-weed plastic and newspaper, but aesthetics weren’t our first concern. Here’s some baby lettuce — yummy.

And a lovely squash

It hasn’t all been worthy of the Burpee’s catalog though. Our tomatoes are decidedly misshapen — even if they are Romanos.

no, it’s not a pepper; it’s a tomato

It’s been an adventure and to tell you the truth, I have done almost no work. I like that part best. As the immortal Nathaniel Hawthorne once wrote:

I used to visit and revisit it a dozen times a day, and stand in deep contemplation over my vegetable progeny with a love that nobody could share or conceive of who had never taken part in the process of creation. It was one of the most bewitching sights in the world to observe a hill of beans thrusting aside the soil, or a rose of early peas just peeping forth sufficiently to trace a line of delicate green. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mosses from and Old Manse

I can’t say I visit the garden very often — certainly not a dozen times a day! — but I do agree that it is very cool to see a garden grow and, better still, eat its produce. Will I do it next year? Only time will tell.

I have this picture of my youngest on the bulletin board above my desk. It always cheers me up. Those adorable feet, those pudgy legs, that happy smile…

Here’s another one of my favorites — and note the sword in hand, the influence of those elder brothers, no doubt (so, too, the chaos in the background).

So this weekend, wherever you are and whatever you do, be as happy as a chubby baby!

Visiting a bookstore with my mother when I was around twelve, I nagged her into letting me buy the first couple volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I chose them because the cover art was cool and the writing clearly awesome. My mother, who read them before I did, found them beautiful but rather nightmarish. It was some years before I actually read the books myself, but once I did I was hooked. Here’s why:

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light.

It is five years ago. Witless of how his death by owls approaches he mourns through each languid gesture, each fine-boned feature, as though his body were glass and at its centre his inverted heart like a pendant tear.

and

The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shriveling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.

So if you need to escape the mundane world of straight lines, sharp angles, and normalcy, pay a visit to Gormenghast!