Good People, Wonderful Spring

The Cherry Trees

Beth, Rita and Rachel

Conversations in a setting sun

A Trial Run

Supplies are bought for my farming adventure:

Boots

Rubber boots

Rain Pants

Carhartt Quilted Womens Overalls
-found at a lovely store in the town of Havre de Grace Md. called Joseph's Department Store  (these are incredibly hard to find, but so worth it:)  

Not to mention that Havre de Grace is right where the Susquehanna and the Chesapeake Bay meet...a small lovely town, with an Irish Pub that has the best fish and chips my sister and I have found outside of Ireland.

A warm Sleeping Bag

a Head Lamp

So yesterday I went up to the Pennsylvannia Farm I worked with last year to try out my overalls and test out my back....and all was a success.  I stood Pruning peach trees and was struck by how much it is like drawing a picture.  My brain shifted to the right side...looking to create spaces for peaches to grow.  In a few months those trees will bear some wonderfully exquisite fruit.  I will miss being in the world of fruit farmers, where trees are treated like their own unique sculpture. But there is much to learn, crop rotations, care of soil and land, growing food that feeds the people and the earth. I leave in 8 days.

  

Sisters who send poems!

Mornings at Blackwater


For years, every morning, I drank
from Blackwater Pond.
It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt,
the feet of ducks.

And always it assuaged me
from the dry bowl of the very far past.

What I want to say is
that the past is the past,
and the present is what your life is,
and you are capable
of choosing what that will be,
darling citizen.

So come to the pond,
or the river of your imagination,
or the harbor of your longing,

and put your lips to the world.
And live
your life.

Mary Oliver

Unexpected Spring

Today, in a park (really a small piece of grassy land amongst the cement landscape of Baltimore) a man held up one of the first blooms of spring and said, "Smell. It is witch hazel." And then he walked on with his two dogs, giving me the gift of spring sweetness.

When I am lacking sunlight....

Tonight I want something to say to the world. Being with people all day, serving soup and homemade bread and spending my evenings being fed by people I love and living in homes provided for me, with lovely people everywhere has overwhelmned me with a sense of goodness and also has made my spirit drifting in many different directions. I keep thinking if only the excercises I am doing for my core muscles could be done for my spirit. Drawing my center together....rooting down to rise up. These ideas have come at me from the yoga class I've dabbled in and from the writings of Kathleen Norris and Wendell Berry. I feel like everywhere I turn I read about the importance of putting roots down...in a place, in a religion. And I thought that I would put roots down in the "greatest city in America," but I am not...I am leaving to lay the roots of plants down...to learn to live the seasons, through planting and harvesting. There is goodness all around me. Good people, good food, good conversations, long walks, and hope for a future. Hope that I will learn and grow soon. That I will move into a new space in life, that I will be changed and altered....which will happen...though never in the way I want or expect or desire....I will learn what life has to teach me...Tonight I will curl up, with my thoughts and hope that I can draw my spirit together the way I am slowly learning to draw together the core of my being.

Kale: the hope of a winter garden!

Embarking on Adventures

This April I leave to go work on a farm in MA. I have learned much about selling fruit and some about growing it. Spending a summer driving up to a Pennsylvannia farm with my sister to train apple trees and grape vines...at time realizing that trees only bend so far and hearing the crack of young wood. But the days in the sun spent with good farmers finally gave me the courage to take the leap into the unknown. I gave up my apartament in the the fine city of baltimore in November and went on a train trip. Crossing the country from PA up to Vancouver, Canada. The slow pace of the train, watching my country change before me renewed my faith in this world, and in the people in it. I spent a month surrounded by beauiful spaces and people and realized that maybe the city is not my space right now. My spirit was at peace on the plains of the Dakotas, in the Mountains of Montanna, on the farm land outside Vancouver. So soon, in less then a month, I leave the abode my sister and her husband have provided for me for the past two months, to go live on the land, in a cabin with no electricity, with cows and pigs and chickens...and hopefully will learn something about growing the food that nourishes us.