102 animal, vegetable, miraclealso put out winter squash, pumpkins, basil seedlings, eggplants, and mel-
ons, including cantaloupes, honeydews, rock melons, perfume melons,
and four kinds of watermelons. Right behind planting come the weeding,
mulching, vigilance for bugs and birds, worry over too much rain or not
enough. It so resembles the never- ending work and attention of parent-
ing, it seems right that it all should begin on Mother’s Day.
For people who grow food, late spring is the time when we pay for the
relative quiet of January, praying for enough hours of daylight to get every-
thing done. Many who farm for a living also have nine- to-five jobs off the
farm and still get it done. In May we push deadlines, crunch our other
work, borrow time, and still end up parking the tractor with its headlamp
beams pointed down the row to fi nish getting the last plants heeled into
place. All through May we worked in rain or under threat of it, playing
chicken with lightning storms. We worked in mud so thick it made our
boots as heavy as elephant feet. On work and school days we started pre-
dawn to get an early hour in, then in the late afternoon picked up again
where we’d left off. On weekends we started at daybreak and fi nished af-
ter dusk, aching and hungry from the work of making food. Labors like
this help a person appreciate why good food costs what it does. It ought to
cost more.
In the midst of our busy spring, one of us had a birthday. Not just a
run-of-the-mill birthday I could happily ignore, but an imposing one, in-
volving an even fraction of one hundred. We cooked up a party plan, set-
ting the date for Memorial Day so out- of-town guests could stay for the
long weekend. We sent invitations and set about preparing for a throng of
guests, whom we would certainly want to feed. Our normal impulse
would have been to stock up on standard- issue, jet- propelled edibles. But
we were deep enough into our local- food sabbatical by now, that didn’t
seem entirely normal.
Something had changed for us, a rearrangement of mindset and the
contents of our refrigerator. Our family had certainly had our moments of
longing for the illicit: shrimp, fresh peaches, and gummy worms, respec-
tively. Our convictions about this project had been mostly theoretical to
begin with. But gradually they were becoming fixed tastes that we now
found we couldn’t comfortably violate for our guests, any more than a