Here, let me catch you up. It’s been 31 weeks of “Shelter-In-Place” in the Bay Area. You may be calling it a quarantine. For some reason, in California it’s a “shelter,” which presumably is supposed to sound safe, but mostly it brings to mind dangerous-things-falling-from-the-sky. Which didn’t happen until about 5 months in, when, indeed, the ashes of burning trees, homes, and lives began to spread out over vast areas of this beautiful state and then slowly descend from the sky to choke our lungs and burn our eyes. But let’s talk about the good stuff.
Our garden down by the lake grew wild and untamed…occasionally watered by someone permitted to enter…while the rest of us wondered what unchecked tricks our plants were performing. When we were finally allowed in, the favas and radishes were taller than my child, in our tiny little plot. A small patch of wilderness, easily tamed by plucking – and tasting – the peppery pods and spicy sweet delicate flowers of the radishes long past harvest. A bite of a newly sprouted kale leaf; a pinch of mint. And then we neglected to water and most of it died.
And then we replanted and remembered to water, and it thrived.
And then the smoke came and we hid inside and it died again.
We planted strawberries on our balcony and – miracle! They thrived! No squirrels to pillage our fruit. For weeks, nearly every day there was a new ripe berry. We also planted a few peas, and they grew tall and green and then…as the first flowers came, they slowly began to die from the bottom up – withering curiously until the dry yellow death reached the newly ripe peas and halted all growth. Luella and I had left town by then, so Derek got that first and only harvest. When we returned, we waited until the chill came and then we planted more. And then the heat came back, so there’s no telling whether they will grow. But this week there are sprouts. Promising. Hopeful.