Year after year

A light drizzle fell throughout the day. Even though some interstate surfers were complaining about the dreary, overcast sky, I was happy.

Happy because it meant that the newly planted out tomatoes, spinach, lettuce and kale (snugly protected from possums in the wire mesh dome) would benefit immensely from this ground soaking rain.

During the whole while that I was preparing the ground earlier in the week –with fresh compost made from last year’s vegetable and fruit trimmings, turning it into the soil and planting out the seedlings– I couldn’t help but sense some ancient rhythm within me keeping time as I participated in this, the gentle, repetitive yearly cycle of gardening.

Donald Hall’s “Ox Cart Man” published some 25 years ago in ‘Kicking the Leaves’, beautifully describes this cycle.

Ox Cart Man

In October of the year,
he counts potatoes dug from the brown field,
counting the seed, counting
the cellar’s portion out,
and bags the rest on the cart’s floor.

He packs wool sheared in April, honey
in combs, linen, leather
tanned from deerhide,
and vinegar in a barrel
hooped by hand at the forge’s fire.

He walks by ox’s head, ten days
to Partsmouth Market, and sells potatoes,
and the bag that carried potatoes,
flaxseed, birch brooms, maple sugar, goose
feathers, yarn.

When the cart is empty he sells the cart.
When the cart is sold he sells the ox,
harness and yoke, and walks
home, his pockets heavy
with the year’s coin for salt and taxes,

and at home by fire’s light in November cold
stitches new harness
for next year’s ox in the barn,
and carves the yoke, and saws planks
building the cart again.

Donald Hall

Looking into the dome this afternoon to check on this year’s new young plants, I wondered if I could ever totally accept the possibility that a contented life need be no more fanciful, no more exciting than this.