grow garden grow

Our garden is growing. The sugar snap peas are almost entirely past now, but the green beans are coming in full force, as are the tomatoes and yellow squash. We even picked a lovely cucumber last week. I want to make some of our own spicy pickles next month. I like briny pickles more than watery cucumbers.

Its a weird summer, this one. Life is in a different place than ever before. That's an obvious thing to state, but my head is wrapping itself around the reality of things, so its somehow still a significant fact to me. Friends are having babies. Friends are battling cancer. Friends are staying put or moving away or buying homes at alarming speed, and the simultaneous steadiness of other aspects of life is slightly disorienting. These days I find joy in revisiting old loves more than in instigating new ones. Rock climbing for the first time in years, pulling my bike out of the barn for the first local ride in months and months, cleaning a familiar kitchen floor- this is the first time in nearly a decade that I have lived in one spot for more than a year. Instead of trying new things I find renewal in digging deeper into the familiar. 

Last weekend my brother referred to me as the "one who never left." Both my siblings moved away for college. I went out of state, but was still just a couple hours from home. I ventured home for Thanksgiving every year, a luxury neither sister or brother could claim. Still, I prickled at being deemed a homebody, "one who is perceived as unadventurous." But, my pet-peeve is dishonesty, especially when people lack the ability to be honest about themselves (who they are, where they are, where they're going). Maybe I am the one who never left.  Maybe I have been doing this cyclical, delving deeper into the familiar, thing for longer than I've realized. Perhaps I need to act on my own peevishness and acknowledge that I am not adventurous in the most basic sense of the word. I am grounded. In some ways, I will never leave. Staying is more important to me than leaving.

I don't know where I'm going with this. Garden. I started at the garden. My joy over the garden exemplifies my point- if I'm to have a point: you can't grow a garden if you don't stay put long enough to till and seed and weed and harvest. We planted asparagus this year and I watched the little sprouts go to seed, accepting that it'll be years before we drizzle oil over any of our own spears and grill them to perfection. Its takes 2-3 years to be able to harvest asparagus, but then the same plant can produce for 20 years! Investment. Commitment past the first harvest. Its not for everyone, but it just might be for me.

Maybe that's why I love this song so much: