|
Farm Share -- for Zoe “I remember breaking beans,” says Theresa, come to collect her portion of organically raised agriculture – Chinese kale this week, and Japanese shiitake mushrooms. Ruth recalls peeling apples as she tucks away her just-laid eggs; Anne-Britte cracked nuts in her native Sweden; Colleen hulled strawberries and picked mint. For myself it was corn, silky strands from Jersey ears falling like the collie’s hair on the driveway, husks (and later, cobs) leftover for the raccoons to discover in the too-easily dumped garbage bins. And I ask them, aren’t all Saturday afternoons supposed to be like this: friends and neighbors retrieving mamey sapote and Bee Heaven honey, the sun one chime away from down, perched on the coral steps of Mango House shelling last week’s delivery of English peas with my daughter, who unzips the pods and combs the seeds as if they were pearls pinging into the metal bowl we share between us, the keepers of curiosity at our fingertips, casings of tradition at our feet. By Jen Karetnick Winner of a 2005 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize. Collected in Necessary Salt (Pudding House Publications, 2007). Please request permission before copying or distributing. |
       |