The Light Through the Trees by Luanne Armstrong

Author:Luanne Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays
ISBN: 9781927575017
Publisher: Caitlin Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lush

The garden is in yet again. The ground is weeded. Three weeks of rain soaked everything, and the fir and cedar have responded with lush electric green tips on their branches. The hot-weather plants, tomatoes and eggplants, are sulking and yellow but their turn will come now the sun is back. Right now they are pushing their root tips into the soggy fertile ground and getting ready to produce mountains of fruit. I planted the large, purple-black eggplants again. Every year I pick them and stare at them. How can a purple be so black, a black be so iridescent? It is impossible to leave the farm at this time of year. There’s always something that needs doing, something to plant, something to weed, something to water, even something to pick. Even though it is only the end of May, the garden is bursting with spinach, radishes, lettuce, onions, Chinese cabbage, Swiss chard, and even broccoli. Every morning, I wander with my coffee. There is always a new flower opening.

And often, late at night, unable to sleep, I read. I read about the oil plumes in the Gulf of Mexico, albatross chicks starving to death after their parents feed them plastic, mistaking it for fish. I read about peak oil and possible food shortages in the future, about global warming, ice sheets melting in Greenland. This fall, I will fill the shelves again with canning, jars full of dried fruit, and a freezer full of vegetables, fruit and meat. Life continues.

And yet I am planning on running away from it all again. Not for long and not soon, but I need to finish the two books I have been slowly working on. So I will try to spend some time in the city in the fall. The farm is a difficult place for a writer. A farm needs to be a community; it needs people; it needs parties and dinners and planning and work. And I need solitude and time to walk and think and write. So I will run away again to the smelly city where the grocery store is full of expensive fruit that I would never pay for at home, but the library is just down the hill and all the tools I need and want as a writer are there: my friends, books, my writer’s life. And all the time my heart will be crying, go home, go home, go home.

And so I will leave again and return as I have so many times.

Today the clouds are rolling in, but the tomatoes are in flower as are the intensely blue Chinese delphiniums, the purple delphiniums, the white miniature roses and the pink poppies that are ready to “pop.”

Whenever I go for a walk, I feel like cheering for them all.

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