La terre simple

I took advantage of the unseasonably warm December weather yesterday and spread bunny poop over the beds. Then we moved Christmas in to winter in the garden.  We set him up with a plank so that he can go up and down from his hutch and he’s so happy he frolics.  When Tristan and Inga visit him he runs in circles around them.

And Laurent bought and stapled some plastic to the hutch to break the wind for him, since he’s out in the open and not tucked against our wood shed anymore.

I’m thinking of vegetable gardens and herbs, despite the fact that we are still in the dead of winter.  I have an uneasy feeling about things.  I can’t put my finger on what exactly is bothering me, but it’s related to the idea that I need to put tomatoes up this year and I’m busy working full time and commuting.  I can’t help feeling that I should be growing and putting up my food – and learning to cook in season.

It’s true that since 2002 I’ve been a csa-er.  And I’ve learned to cook a lot of what we get form the farm, learned to look for local produce,  roast roots, all of that.  But my hands don’t feel dirty enough and I don’t feel close enough to the land, somehow.

So 2012 will hopefully be a year of digging, and collecting rain water.  Of composting, marking the moon cycles, of weeding, and cooking.   And simplifying what I can.  Where I can.  When I can.

Our friends have pulled up stakes, packed the kids, and gone off to New Zealand.  Since their arrival, the ground has been shaking with earth quakes.  When I read that it fit, somehow, with this need I ‘ve been feeling to get down in the dirt, frozen though it is.  I want to put my cheek against it, my hands into it.  And somehow tell it that I’m sorry I’ve been ignoring it, that I love it, that it means something to me and I’m sorry I don’t tell it often enough.  Because the shaking, along with the other extreme weather we experience, makes me feel like it’s fed up with us.  I know that sounds irrational.  But those are my feelings.

I think the truth is that I’m fed up with myself, though.  I know better then to consume more than I give back to the planet.  And yet I do consume more than I give back.  Mostly out habit, but also out of some strange social contract I imagine I’m in, in which I participate in mainstream society for the sake of it.

Maybe this year I’ll find the balance between the two.