seasonality

We shared two cherry tomatoes this morning, the first ripe ones of the year, and that, to us, is the proof we're fully into high summer. If I don't pick the zucchini every day, I'm sorry. The weather is hot and sultry, the apricots are close to ripe and the peaches are following. The boys drown in fruit every day - it is the one thing I can't say no to. The fireflies sparkle like fireworks. The kids live in the creek and under the sprinkler, and seem to stretch out daily, getting taller, stronger, learning new things. Tonight we're headed to a baseball game (local minor league) - what…
If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you've raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time - like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year - and when you grow your own, you are always thinking of the future - even if not consciously about any particular dinner. It is in January that we order seeds for the vegetables we'd serve at Thanksgiving, that we debate which varieties of pumpkin and carrots, celery root, sweet corn, squash and leeks…
One of the tensions in my life -is that between two kinds of time. "Fast Time" is the world I live in, the one with a two hour meeting scheduled at 7pm, my husband's classes at 12:35, Eli's bus at 8:15 and 3:30... payments due by the first of the month, etc... It is the world run on clocks and calendars, where expectations can be fixed and formalized. All of us live in fast time in some measure, some of us almost completely, others only barely. There is, however, no good way of escaping it entirely. I also live in slow time. Slow time is the world of things that cannot be subject to…