(“I’m waiting…”)

Sometimes a couple of lines in a book will make me laugh outright:

You agree it will do for meantime.

The first thirty six year of meantime just flew by while you were meaning to find (… the solution)

from: First Buy a Field, by Rosamund Young. This beautiful book is a gift to me from my environmentalist-minded daughter, Nika. And yes, when you are setting up an organic farm, when you are dealing with soil formation, that number of years is nothing. It’s astounding how long it took to create the gorgeous soil that we so prize.

I grew up on a farm. My mother cared deeply about organic soil years before it was a thing. I ate her okra and peas and seaweed bread – and let it be her peculiarity. I did little other than collect and carry compost out to the “graveyard”, the walled in area that my parents told us they’d be buried. That seemed far away then. That time would never come.

Meantime…

I appreciate my mother’s caring for the earth now in a way that I didn’t firsthand. But I also love that what she saw was the bigger picture. She traveled to Scotland and New Zealand, all over Canada and this country to promote organic farming. She understood that time does matter. Especially – the long time.

And that we are all interconnected. The soil, the farms, the trees, the air, the people. Nothing is not affected by everything else.

So, I tell myself: it’s okay to take a moment. To let the pup wait. To have to do that art over. It’s tiny. All of it is tiny.

And it all matters.