"Homes aren't refuges from history, they are where history ends up." Bill Bryson in At Home: a Short History of Private Life
The magic of harvesting potatoes never loses its sparkle for me.
Today's magnificent pre monsoon dawn sky saw me, fingers probing into crumbly, earthwormy earth, tumble a bowl of gypsy ruby and indigo purple gems to the surface.
Apricots, semi netted, swell into a sanyasi golden ripeness. Soon.
Wind and my still awkward clumsiness with left arm and hand mean the bird nets are a mess this year. A better plan must be devised for the logistics of netting the fruit trees in future. There's evidence of a fair amount of beaked predation of apricots already. Plums are still too green and grapes a long way off.
Outfront in the Desert Kerb Appeal project, an unusually purple opuntia is flourishing alongside a currently flowering Chilopsis linearis (aka Desert Willow), planted in 2019. Some people prune their Chilopsis into a single stem. Should I be doing that?
A pad of this purple opuntia was liberated, in summer 2022, from an ailing specimen in front of a shuttered business on the road out of town. It didn't do much of anything until this spring when those four new pads erupted. Cacti do that: hunker down and take stock for a while before deciding whether a place is worth calling home.
Also in the Kerb Appeal project, the Chihuahuan desert native, Hesperaloe parviflora (Red yucca or Texas yucca) are setting lovely knobby seed pods on their long flower spikes.
There's an immanence of Eryngium (Sea Holly) tucked into the edge of the blooming jungle which the front garden has become. This is the lone survivor of the four purchased last summer. This one's for you, Last Emperor.
I'm the richest person on earth this morning. And that was before the eleventh hour release, late last night, of my social security cheque which a bunch of mostly old, white, unwise men in the east were holding hostage.
Heads should roll, but they won't, at least not today, so I'm going to make potato pancakes for breakfast and savour this worthy life.
We are all curators of our past, unfolding our own origin stories even as we tell the future in the flickering firelight of the present.
Recommended reading:
The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee - David Treuer, 2019.