Maybe you know that feeling: the three-quarters done feeling, the three-quarters blues. The wow, I've been doing this thing for a long time, and I'm kind of tired of it, and I'm getting grumpier and grumpier just thinking how I have to keep on.
Such as when you're washing a mountain of dishes, and you're almost to the top but not quite, and you really hate all these cruddy dishes, and your hands are all soggy, and you know if you leave the last quarter instead of finishing, the dishes will seemingly overnight become a mountain again. You keep on washing.
Or maybe you've been picking millions of cherry tomatoes for months and you really want to be done picking them, but you were a responsible farmer, and covered the row when the early frost came, and now you've still got cherry tomatoes to pick. And you think, huh, how come the flowers and beans and squash all died, but you didn't, you cherry tomatoes? But you keep on picking.
Or maybe you spent so many hours weeding this season that you think there can't possibly be any more weeds, and even though you mostly love weeding, now you can't stand it, it's been too much, too long, but your outside carrots didn't germinate well, so you tried planting some in the greenhouse, and of course, in the nice warm greenhouse, the weeds are still growing. Geez, why did you ever think you loved weeding? But you keep on weeding.
Or maybe it is like when your kitchen is full of seconds: eggplant, tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, zucchini yellow squash cucumbers broccoli tomatillos kale chard spinach, the list is endless, and it all needs to be put by for the winter. You know that in a month or six weeks your kitchen will no longer have trays full of slowly getting limper and limper vegetables, and you will be very glad for all that preserved food, but it is hard to keep that in mind when you are ¾ of the way through it all. But you keep on slicing and canning and freezing.
Or maybe it is like when you had a friend's small boy visit. Now the friend loves the farm, and she loves the boy, who is the son of her own dear friend, and the small boy immediately loves the farm. He is maybe eight years old, and this farm is the best thing he's ever seen. Then we do a little project, because this is a working visit. You decide on a fun kind of working visit job, clearing little rocks out of the greenhouse bed. The small boy thinks this is great. For quite a while.
Then, ¾ of the way through the job, he says “This is the worst day of my life! I'm going to call my mother! I'm going back home!” Back home happens to be on the West Coast, which is not too near NH. Your friend is gasping in shock at the boy hating the farm, and worried the farmer will be insulted. But you, the farmer, just laugh. You know those ¾ blues. And hey, if this is the worst day of this small boy's life, things are going pretty well. (And hey, likewise for the farmer.) With a little encouragement, we all keep on picking up those little rocks.
Of course, you'd much rather spend all afternoon in the warm sun on a blanket reading a book, especially the wonderful Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Kimmerer weaves together traditional indigenous teaching and Western science, and tells of making maple syrup, both the gift of the sap, and the work of the syrup. She writes: “[the] teachings remind us that one half of the truth is that the earth endows us with great gifts, the other half is that the gift is not enough. The responsibility does not lie with the maples alone. The other half belongs to us; we participate in its transformation. It is our work, and our gratitude, that distills the sweetness” (69).
Oh all right, maybe I can be a little grateful in my grump. Because I sure do love this book, and highly recommend it, whether you are reading half the day in your backyard, or for two minutes before you fall asleep. Maybe it will even turn a ¾ grump into a full-on gratitude.
Originally published in the Monadnock Shopper News, Oct 21 – Oct 27, 2020