By Zoë Bradbury
August 21, 2008
It was last Friday that I wondered – momentarily – if my brain was going spongy. It was a harvest morning and I began to notice that all I was doing was noticing: the dahlias, the red-handled flower shears in my right hand, the white five gallon buckets sitting in the row behind me, the yellow, polka-dotted cucumber beetles mating on a burgundy petal, their innards the same regal color as I squished them between my thumb and forefinger – reducing by a few hundred the number of larvae that will hatch in September and maul my butterhead lettuce.
I got the flowers into the shade and moved on to lettuce. Down the row, counting. One hundred forty-four heads of romaine toppled at the tip of my lettuce knife. Lime green, white-ribbed heads lay on their sides down the length of the bed. The sun started to get higher. I moved faster. I packed a dozen heads per tote, onto the cart, into the truck, under shade.
Then beets. I was bent at the waist, pulling, looking for big, round ones. Down the row. Armloads of beets, side by side with the fennel, fennel bulbs looking juicy and white and fat under their canopy of lacy green foliage. The orders were for topped beets, but I saved all the greens and packed them into a bag for the owners of a local restaurant – whose tortoise loves beet greens. Does the tortoise prefer gold beet greens or red beet greens? Chioggia? I tasted them to see if I could discern a difference.
It was when I caught myself dwelling on the tortoise and its culinary preferences that I had my moment of worry. Is this all that’s left in my head? I vaguely remembered springtime when I was planting out lettuce starts and building my greenhouse, always thinking about new farmer issues and pulling the write-in-the-rain notepad from my back pocket to jot down the bones of my next op-ed. Sending essays to The New York Times. That was April.
This is August. And August is so full, it does to a vegetable farmer what many people spend hours of meditation trying to achieve. August makes you empty. Amidst the everything-ness, August brings you close to nothingness. I have become the vessel, doing the quiet bidding of lettuce and strawberries, day in and day out.
Not stupid. Not spongy, I realize. Simply present. More present than any other time of the year. Later, the other thoughts will return. There will be time to listen to the news, and more time to write again. I will come out of the produce tunnel and re-encounter the world that is meanwhile out there, full of its wars and Olympic games and Hollywood gossip and presidential campaigns.
For now though, eat sleep farm squish cucumber beetles. Their innards are always the same color as the petals that they have eaten holes through.
Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.
