As the minutes tick by until Katie meets N on Sunday, I needed some wood to chop. My brother and his wife invited me down to their hobby farm for the weekend.
This morning Jeff and I fired up the tractors and maneuvered the chipper and dump trailer into position. Wearing hearing protection and safety glasses and gloves, we fed branches from downed trees and garden detritus into the chipper's maw and watched it spit mulched bits between the screen walls of the trailer.
The hickory trees produced thousands of nuts before a storm destroyed them. The okra that produced stunning blossoms and bags and bags of produce now nothing but dried stalks. Tomato and tomatillo and basil, once brilliant and flavorful, now dead and gone.
It's noisy, messy work and strangely sad.
At the end, we dumped the trailer onto the compost pile, and suddenly, everything looked different. Even though their initial seasons have passed, care and attention and time will transform what remains into fertile soil in which something new will grow.
Sounds good to me.
7 comments:
It is perfection. As is your writing. As are you. So glad you got this physical lesson today. I'm with you in your waiting, wishing you peace.
Love everything about this post. What I love most is that you didn't just write about it, you got your hands dirty and experienced it.
Amen. Nothing like clearing it all out, so new life can sprout.
:)
Ditto Riversgrace.
The Universe is ever expanding. Always new. Always more.
Love.
'Scuse me. Gotta go do some fall cleanup. Thanks for the inspiration! (Bubba thanks you, too).
What a beautiful analogy, especially when you have watched a properly cared for compost pile turn into black gold.
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