hurricane watch

We don't expect much drama from Hurricane Earl when he arrives tomorrow morning. By then he will likely have melted, wicked witch-like, into something that more resembles a gale. He'll either be windy rain or rainy wind. Either way, we're ready. Greg has put away all the signs, chairs, chariots, garbage cans, and boats: anything that could fly or crash.

Today he picked the ripe-enough apples that might blow down, and I picked more beans, since their brittle plants are likely to blow away,
and the basil, since it could get smashed too.
The tomatoes dangling greenly I leave in the hand of God. The kitchen is ready for Greg to turn it into an applesauce and pesto factory tonight. I'm sure it's pesto and applesauce the authorities mean when they talk about storm preparation.
We don't need to worry about losing power. There will be plenty of wind for the turbine.
And -- all on their own initiative, I might add -- the hens have decided to go on hurricane watch. They have taken up a strategic position from which they are staring in three directions for signs of Earl. When the last hen has laid her day's egg, she'll join the guard. Her assigned position will be looking east, so I think she will miss all the excitement.

how the music changes

The birds have been slipping away for some time now. I last saw the hummingbirds in the evening on the 31st so I guess they left that night, or early the next morning. They didn't say good-bye, even after we had such a good time together. The juncos and sparrows and mourning doves have left too, along with their babies. The warblers no longer flit among the bayberry down in the bog. The woods where the kinglets dwell is silent. And I haven't seen the robins for a while, though some of them winter over here, so maybe they are only taking a short vacation.

Yesterday I heard a white-throated sparrow's half-hearted song, and there's still one small sparrow of some sort who believes the vegetable garden is her personal kingdom. Other than those laggards, most of the beautiful singers -- the ones that make you stop whatever you're doing and listen -- have gone away and they didn't say where.

As sometimes happens, when the lead singers go off in search of greater glory or at least someplace warmer, you are not exactly bereft after all. It turns out that there were other musicians here all along, practicing quietly to themselves and waiting for their moment. Now their moment has come and they are ready. Bees and grasshoppers and dragonflies saw away on their tiny fiddles. Red squirrels add percussive texture. Lamb and ewe duets offer heart-felt recitative. The seal chorus really only knows its one song, but they love it dearly and never get tired of singing it over and over, their end-of-summer lament.

And there's the single loon who lives year-round in the cove. She's an aged alto, once famous but now retired to this obscure spot. She's still got her voice, and when she sings the island's enthusiastic amateurs fall silent, as anybody would in the presence of greatness.

welcome to bean world

The beans are flourishing, and I am beginning to think maybe I planted too many of them. There are two trellises of pole beans and two beds of bush beans. The bush bean seed packet contained a few random pole beans put there by some trickster seed packet packer somewhere, so there are also pole beans sprawling around among their more upright and conscientious relatives and making awkward late night take-over moves, ambitious climbers with no place to go.The horizontal cross bar on one of the trellises -- an eight foot long 2"x 2" milled from island spruce -- sagged and sagged until at last it snapped in half under the weighty morass of twisted vines, spreading leaves and dangling beans. I don't care, though.
Every other morning I work my way around this trellis, parting a dense jungle of leaves and dodging bees to peer as deeply into bean world as I dare. The challenge is making sense of such manic, burgeoning complexity. I can only see parts of beans amid fractured shards of shadow and sunlight. They are rarely dangling properly as they are supposed to, more often wedged up behind the trellis netting or lolling across a twisted bunch of leaves. Some of them do hide in plain sight, growing larger and larger until even the most distracted seeker could find them, gigantic foot-long beans, cartoon beans, beans guaranteed to get your attention no matter what.
I begin my every-other morning bean harvest with a slow, patient, systematic search for normal-size beans. Be mindful, I tell myself. Be Zen-like. Appreciate the beans. Let the beans be your teacher. But pretty soon my disciplined approach breaks down into something primitive, Lord of the Flies-ish. Even though it's early, the garden is hot, and there are mosquitoes about, and my hands have a mind of their own. Half way around the trellis they assert themselves, not at all mindfully. Whatever they locate by accident, they take. Whatever they miss, they miss and don't even know it. My hands are in a hurry, and greedy. They are focused on the bottom line. So many beans! they think. Let's get this over with. My hands get impatient and they don't look back.

Later we eat a few of these many, many beans, which Greg has sautéed in olive oil with garlic and tomatoes. Briefly, I manage to allow a tiny sliver of amazement. What we are eating here -- what is giving us sustenance and keeping us from hunger -- these green beans, our daily bread -- came directly into our kitchen and thence onto our supper plates from the combination of seeds and dirt and sun and water and season: a miraculous harvest, even if there's a part of me that takes it for granted every single time.