It ws a beautiful day yesterday—warm and sunny and dry.
Rare in western Oregon in late winter. We did the laundry early, hung it all up
outside to dry, and walked up to the Farmer’s Market. By the time we got home,
we were both humming Greg Brown’s song:
Love calls like the wild birds-
It's another day
A Spring wind blew my list of
Things to do...away
“I don’t want to clean the kitchen,
even though it is a mess,” I told Mark, who did not want to attack the
bathroom, either. So we called it a truce for the house and wandered out into
the back yard. There was compost to cut up, beds to toss over to help work the
leaves and chicken straw into the soil, trimming to do, and cats to chase
around. Mark brought us lunch and tea to the sitting area by the arch covered
with honeysuckle, and one cat basked in the hooped bed, warm and dry, while we
ate and read for a bit. After lunch, we went to the local nursery, bought a
columnar apple, and planted it between two raised beds, bringing the number of
fruit trees in the yard up to ten.
It is that time of year where several hours in the yard does not more the dial very far on tidying up. I will come in, look out the back window and wonder “What did I just do?” So, as I worked, I reminded myself—this is not a garden, full of flowers in matching pots and cute little signs, with perfectly mulched paths where bantam chickens wander and never eat the kale. It’s really a small farm, a homestead, raising food for the household, populated by people, cats, a rabbit, chickens, and, yes, slugs and aphids. Jays claim their space loudly. Squirrels dig up nuts they hid in October and taunt the cats. We’ve had possums for years, although there are none right now, sadly. It is a workshop, a studio, a living room, a meditation space, and a retreat from the world. It is far from perfect. But, on a sunny day in March, it is our home.
