Tag Archives: food

Not Gardening in Eden

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Yesterday morning my daily Bible reading was Genesis, the creation story. It’s a very beautiful and mysterious story: the water was already there, it had to be gathered, there needed to be separations of many things. It never fails to move me and ignite my curiosity.

Especially yesterday, because after the Earth is full of plants and other things, dominion over them is given to the humans. I was thinking happy thoughts about the long line of connectedness with me putting in a garden, working with seeds and dirt, reaching back to God giving humans the first garden. That whole blowing it thing and the expulsion could wait. Give me my moment.

That moment was coming. Our friend Philip arrived to help, and he weeded one bed while I put up supports for peas in another. Then I went and got a truckload of dirt and compost to amend some soil; it took us 21 wheelbarrow loads to get it in the right places. By 2 pm, that 8 am “what a glorious thing to participate in” was more like “when is this going to be over.”

I doubt muscles in the Garden of Eden screamed “what the hell Lady” at Eve in the afternoon. I doubt their chickens decided eating new seed was better than eating grubs–which we were feeding them every time we found one. I know for a fact that Adam never had a blister on his baby toe from dirt getting inside his shoe and rubbing–they weren’t wearing shoes.

According to the story, at that time getting good food from the plants didn’t involve having to grow them yourself. Taking a line from Genesis, I snipped a bunch of fresh hosta shoots for dinner. Free food we didn’t grow, tasty for the taking. Philip, his partner Geoffrey, Jack and I sat down to last year’s carrots canned overwinter, the hosta shoots, and some nice Scottish Sausage patties Jack put together for us.

Go by mad world. Gardening may not be Eden, and my muscles may have the vocabulary of sailors this morning given the obscenities they are offering up with each move, but it was still fun.

These Customers Look Awfully Familiar…

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by Andrew Whalen, Shopsitter

It was approaching closing time. Jack and I had spent much of the afternoon doing what many Americans do in the afternoon: staring at computer screens and not exchanging a single word. We were liberated from our digital overlords when a friend stopped by and forced us to have actual human conversation.

Then the door chimed, signaling customers.

A woman walked in and stared right at me. I wound up to deliver a casual “let me know if there’s anything I can help you find.” But something made me pause. Why is this woman staring at me? Stop that! And then I panicked… I knew what was happening.  Crud, I thought, this must be a local that I’ve met sixteen times and I totally can’t remember her name.

All of these thoughts took about four seconds, but it seemed like much longer. The wheels in my head felt as if they were manned by the world’s laziest hamsters. And she was so familiar…..

It was my mother. My dad stepped in behind her. It all clicked into place. “What. The. Hell.” I said.

Their arrival seemed impossible, so it took a moment for my mind to believe it. Modern travel has conditioned us to ignore the actual space between our spaces. I fell asleep on a bus leaving New York and woke up in Big Stone Gap. The in-between didn’t really exist.

I think we all do this, segregating different zones, holding them separate in our memory and in the ways we think about them. So when my relations from the Ohio-Zone showed up in Big Stone Gap-Zone it took a full furniture rearrangement in my head before I could process it.

Or, at least, that’s my best excuse for swearing at my parents instead of leaping up to greet them with open arms.

They had taken the weekend to drive down from Columbus, Ohio, the back axle of their SUV sagging under the sheer tonnage of snacks and carefully Tupperwared dinners my mom assembled. When it comes to food my mom plans even day-trips like expeditions into the uncharted Congo.

She runs a cookie business (CookieGlass.com!) and is always mindful of food. So when she learned that the evening was to be a dinner with local friends and a visiting writer (Mary Hamilton, telling stories from her excellent book Kentucky Folktales), food was her first concern. We bolted over to the grocery store, my mother determined to supplement the spread. “Now, try not to eat everything,” she warned my Dad several times. It didn’t end up being a problem.

After my parents returned to their hotel in the evening, Jack gleefully relayed my initial shock to the remaining guests. But while the intro may have been a bit bumpy, I hope they had a good time. I showed them around the town and they picked up books for my younger brother and sister. Plus, they managed to get in a bit of every parent’s favorite recreational activity: embarrassing their children. I’m still not sure how it came up, but my Mom managed to share my recurring haunted mirror nightmare with a fair portion of the county. Thanks Mom!

Editor’s note: Andrew’s parents were delightful, and their food delicious; we sent Andrew on useless errands and ate most of it while he was out. And yes, we did egg them on for embarrassing stories to use against our favorite shopsitter. But as we told Andrew, his mother’s forgetting to pack childhood pictures for posting in the bookstore was a serious disappointment. Still, the cookies are so good that we forgive her.