The first seed catalog of the year arrived in yesterday’s post. I’ve already nearly read it cover to cover.
When I was a kid and hadn’t learned the meaning of the word “hype” yet, I pretty much believed the blurbs attached to each seed variety. Trying to make out my order was a sweaty and anxious process, because you knew that the family’s quality of life depended upon your choices.
Which green bean? The one that climbs to a height of 45 feet and picks itself or the one with twice the legal limit of Vitamins B and C?
Aaauuuuggggghhhhhh. I must chooose!
For gardening 2024 Robin and I will probably focus on tomatoes and various greens, which have worked out the best for us. We’ve had poor luck with spinach, but some leaf lettuces and kale have done well. I read an article just the other day about the newest candidate for “superfood” status, which is collard greens. One of the original “soul foods.”
According to the advance notices, collards are so health-promoting that they need to be ingested with care and in small doses at first. One doesn’t want to take one’s body from sad sack to tower of strength in a few short minutes.
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We have two gardening problems here in Paradise that we didn’t experience in the Midwest. The first is that there isn’t adequate rainfall, and so we have to be very consistent in our watering. Consistency, you may recall my mentioning in the past, is not my strongest suit.
The second is that there’s way more sunshine than is needed. Enough that it sometimes causes visible physical damage to the fruits of the plants. We move containers from place to place, provide sunscreens, anything we can do to run interference for the growing things. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Some days are diamonds, some days are stones.
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From The New Yorker
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Several days a week I force myself to go to the rec center and accept the many small humiliations. Yesterday I waited at one station for a 220 pound muscle at least a foot taller than myself whose t-shirt read “Combat Ready” to finish his exercise. I know his height because the message on his shirt was at my eye level. His body rippled in a myriad of places where mine has only creases.
When my turn comes at such times it takes me several minutes to lower weight and resistance levels on the machine, down to numbers that I can deal with. Numbers, if you want to know the truth, that are sort of poignantly minute. But you do what you can, as Robin tells me over and over as she whips past me on the walking track with her titanium knees. Sometimes she goes by so quickly I can smell the odor of burning Vibram.
There was a time when the musical artist Billie Eilish wore bulky and shapeless clothing at her performances because she wasn’t ready to have the world comment on her body at her young age.
I totally got it.
The other day I looked at myself in the mirror before taking off for an exercise session in my gym outfit and realized that when I stood perfectly still what I most resembled was a pile of soiled laundry in the corner of the room.
You do what you can.
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Let’s suppose that late in this autumn we can be blessed to be in a country where a racist fascist sexist immoral deplorable sexual predator of a candidate is soundly defeated. So badly that it wakes up the scapegraces, cowards, and fools in his party and they begin to actually act like a GOP and make this defeated person (who may or may not be an unnatural color) irrelevant.
What is obvious that even if we enter a happy day without this demented person in it there are millions of his followers who are filled with fear. Of what? Could be social change. Could be job insecurity. Could be that they really believe that there are Marxist hordes at our gates and only John Wayne Donald Cluck can keep them from overrunning the country?
Even if Cluck is exiled (0h joy, oh rapture), those millions are still here and we need to find the way to live with and work alongside one another. If not as soulmates, at least as countrymen.
I am reminded of one of my favorite posters from the ‘60s. The graphic is by Ben Shawn, but the quotation goes all the way back to 1874 and a man named John Morley.
The most rabid of Cluck’s followers would suppress dissent. We can do better than that. We need to do better than that.
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From The New Yorker
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One last thing this morning. I think that Mr. Biden nailed it on Thursday night. I especially liked when he called out the Supremes for downing Roe v. Wade. The expressions of the court’s members who were present looked like they were trying to swallow millipedes as the President spoke.
I haven’t watched a state of the union speech for years, but I found myself turning on the television with a heart full of apprehensions while waiting for the President to show up.
After the first five minutes of the speech I began to relax. This was not a doddering old fool in front of us, but a knowledgeable political warrior with way more experience than the majority of his listeners, punching hard at his opposition. And he was singing a song I longed to hear.
I am reassured. Count me in.
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Lastly, do not call me, text me, or send me an email that requires a brisk response Sunday evening . I am going to watch the Oscar ceremonies and will not acknowledge any interruptions.
I know it’s a waste of several precious hours of my life but do I care a jot, tittle, atom, or whit? I do not.
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Little Home In The Valley 
very enjoyable writing
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