Life on the Edge

A light drizzle fell throughout the day and even though some visiting surfers from interstate were complaining a little about the dreary, overcast sky, I was happy because it meant that the newly planted out tomatoes, spinach, lettuce and kale (snugly protected from possums in the wire mesh dome) would benefit immensely from this ground soaking rain. During the whole while that I was preparing the ground earlier in the week with fresh compost made from last years vegetable and fruit trimmings, turning it into the soil and planting out the seedlings, I couldn't help but sense some ancient rhythm within me keeping time as I participated in this gentle, repetitive yearly cycle of gardening. Donald Hall's "Ox Cart Man" published some 25 years ago in Kicking the Leaves, beautifully describes this cycle. Ox Cart Man In October of the year, he counts potatoes dug from the brown field, counting the seed, counting the cellar's portion out, and bags the rest on the cart's floor. He packs wool sheared in April, honey in combs, linen, leather tanned from deerhide, and vinegar in a barrel hooped by hand at the forge's fire. He walks by ox's head, ten days to Portsmouth Market, and sells potatoes, and the bag that carried potatoes, flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose feathers, yarn. When the cart is empty he sells the cart. When the cart is sold he sells the ox, harness and yoke, and walks home, his pockets heavy with the year's coin for salt and taxes, and at home by fire's light in November cold stitches new harness for next year's ox in the barn, and carves the yoke, and saws planks building the cart again. Looking into the dome this afternoon to check on this year's new young plants, I wondered if I could ever totally accept the possibility that a contented life need be no more fanciful, no more exciting than this.