Bearing fruits of juicy grace

You cannot walk down any street or drive down any road without seeing passersby scrolling through their smart phones to check emails or texting instead of talking. It never fails when Jorma and I go out to eat...as I glance around the restaurant at the other tables there’s always a table where one of the two at the table is sitting in silence while their dinner mate is emailing. For everything that technology has given us, we have lost something so personal in the trade. I’m not advocating throwing out our computers...I love my Mac and my IPhone. I just bought Jorma an IPad for Fathers Dad...secretly hoping that he would want me to have one to. It worked. I am anxiously awaiting mine, which should be here according to Apple in
7 – 10 days. As much as I love these tools, I miss the simple ways of communicating.

As most of you know, we live and run the Ranch in one of the most stunning places in this country...the foothills of Appalachia. I write a lot about the land because it really brought me back to a simple and realistic place that I had long left behind. The things that really please me today are wrap around front porches on an old farm house or hillsides dotted with a variety of cows. A traffic jam on my country road is when my neighbors kids are walking the cows across the road to give them a new day in a neon green pasture. You cannot help but live in that moment.

This past spring I decided to grow a garden and not just a few tomatoes. In a 30 x 40 fenced in area in our back yard (or lower 40 as Jorma calls our yard) I constructed 7 5x5 raised beds, filled them with organic dirt and the best local manure around. I looked at other gardens in magazines and books and finally decided to made a home for the next 6 months to a few varieties of tomatoes, red and green peppers, silver queen corn, radishes, beets, cucumbers. eggplant, green leaf lettuce, dill, coriander, basil, parsley and oregano, a few garden angels and old stained glass windows hanging from the fence. My garden brought me to a place where there were no phones, no one Facebooking me and no one texting me. A garden is such a meditative place and I cherish mine and the undemanding relationship with it.

Last night I went out to see how the tomatoes were doing and it was like Hanukkah. Every bed was filled with almost ripe or ripe vegetables that Izze and I grew. My peppers were the size of a 4 years old forearm. My tomatoes were red an plump. My cucumbers fat and falling off the vine. My corn sadly stopped developing after the 10th row of kernels but my two new eggplants made it all better. I have a new crop of lettuce and more herbs than I will use. Anything I cannot eat or family won’t take I will bring to the shelter before it goes bad. My whole garden experience this year was so fulfilling. Early on I took pictures of Izze helping me with the seedlings and it gave me such joy. I planted seeds for food and I ended up with baskets of peace, thyme away from my computer and a recipe for real communication with the universe. Now let me grab my IPhone and take a great picture to send to everyone.