Shelling heirloom calypso beans: a growing mound of white beans dipped in black lacquer. Some of the lacquer spatters the white lending them their other name – yin-yang beans.
We walk to the garden to harvest fresh mesclun, collards, turnips, tomatoes for our meals and add them to the stored black beans, ground corn, salsa and onions from last year’s bounty. Gonner, their one time cow offers ground beef for the meal.
We weed, harvest, walk the land and swim amid a profusion of bird song. Bobolink and meadowlark, gold finch and indigo bunting, rose breasted grosbeak and yellow warbler all nest around their home. Beavers have dammed the stream and a bear left scat among a tangle of raspberry bushes.
We did, of course, drive to town for the fireworks display. Kids with glow sticks and light sabers competed with the great blooming fireworks overhead. It was the stars though that filled me with awe, our distance from town and a waning moon left the sky stripped bare of brighter lights and allowed the stars to shine through with the smudge of milky way in their midst.
My hosts’ groundedness provides a solid warp to my wandering weft; from their settledness I drive west, leaving my home landscape behind filled with gratitude and the bounty of summer.
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