garlic planted

 We laboured at our task with the sun heating our backs. One hundred and fifty huge cloves of garlic are lovingly nestled in a blanket of dirt, all covered by a protecting layer of plastic. A makeshift fence surrounds the bed to keep Adia from zooming right through it. We could not have asked for a more beautiful day!

First we split up about 50 bulbs to pick the biggest cloves for planting. Some bulbs were almost the size of my fist and they’d only have 4 or 5 cloves each. We put aside the smaller ones and gosh! there were lots of huge ones. We’d exclaim to each other ‘look at this one!’ as we peeled the outer layers of paper to expose the individual cloves.

Then we gathered our tools and went outside. Carm raked the bed to get rid of Adia’s foot prints, then we lay down a carpet of plastic. Time to plant. Carm did the lion’s share of the work as the soil was difficult. I used a giant screwdriver to stab holes in a semi organized grid. Well, it started that way but by the end it was more ‘freeform’. Regardless, the cloves all found a spot.

I was thinking about light. Not light bulbs (although they have been at the forefront of my consciousness as we smarten everything up), but light from stars. It is a miracle that the pinpoint of light from a distant star is able to make it all the way to Earth. Think about it. Tiny photons travel light years in an organized fashion to delight us with the milky way. The Big Dipper is a wonder in the sky.

I was telling Carm about my thoughts and of course he immediately segued into scientific explanations… I think he missed the point!

Some sentences are harder to start than others… tonight we were talking about Carm’s old best friend that we parted ways with over 25 years ago, hoping that he was in a happy place and that his life had worked out for him... so I went to look him up on Facebook while Carm hit Google. His first hit was an obituary from 2 years ago. The shock felt like I’d taken a knee to the stomach and looking over at Carm it seemed that he’d felt the same punch. I hope our friend had been happy and had found a life that suited him. R.I.P. Brian.

Awesome!

“150 cloves of garlic lovingly put in the earth. We await next summers pungent bounty”

“bright blue sky”

“Adia zooming around while we went about our labours”

“delishous soup from the freezer for supper”

“huge cloves of garlic”