Garlic planting season
It’s time to plant the garlic so it has a chance to sprout and root before the cold weather comes. If it ever comes. We’ve hovered in the low 90s for days now, and the humidity has socked me into myself and made me feel like I’m menopausal. Maybe tonight when I get home from my after-work meeting with Lila’s teacher, I can get the cloves separated and ready to go. Then Wednesday night I can pick a bed and get them buried.
Two winters ago I wrote an essay about planting garlic that Becca kindly helped me to tame into order. I shopped it around a bit, but had no takers. When I read it again recently, I thought “who cares? so you had a good day planting garlic.”
I love how time can help loosen the grip of attachment I get on my work. How it lets me see things in a new light and with a more practical, logical eye. I also love a few sentences in my essay and hope I find a new way to use them one day.
I straddle the row and bend forward to plant each clove, flat end down, point up. After several awkward placements, my body seeks an economy of motion. The bag next to my left foot, I hold several cloves in my left hand, slide the narrow trowel with my right into the crest of the hill, pull the soil forward, place a clove, twist to set it firmly. I stretch forward, dig and pull to open a new hole and close the previous, place the clove, twist, and stretch forward again. My shoulders ache, I bend my knees, dig and pull, place a clove, twist. My balance shifts, I step ahead, move the bag closer, grab more cloves. Repeat.
This is how I approach my days lately.
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
October 9th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Sounds almost like a meditation—one with sore knees.
This year I will try to plant garlic, too. The temperaure is dropping and rain is on the way.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
I love getting into that planting rhythm and letting my mind just wander . . .