Life in the Faster Lane

I am having trouble finding my feet right now.  Maybe this is how surfers feel, as though there is a wave of energy underneath and the work is to do what needs doing to ride the ride.  We are just home from San Francisco, with all the shaking up that travel bestows, still aglow with the invigoration of time with Eamon and girlfriend Archana.  New restaurants, walks on the Embarcadero where the America's Cup is being staged, drives through wine country and the redwood forests and just the "its all possible" feeling that San Francisco emanates.  Try it, just try it and see what happens.

The kitchen garden at The French Laundry:

Perhaps that explains why after five years of roasting coffee, and after many years of developing recipes and baking for custom clients, and a couple of years at Farmer's Markets, I stopped the day after we got back at one of my favorite on-farm locations, The Bradford Store on Highway 73.  If you haven't been there, well, it is the quintessential country store, established in 1912, with a modern edge.  To the soft wooden floors and the creaky screen door, add organic produce grown in the surrounding fields.  Local cheeses, and meats, my friend Kelly's bread baked fresh that morning. . .its a dream, really.  (www.thebradfordstore.com)  The picture on the website does not do it justice.  Picture it surrounded by a cottage garden, a cabin selling antiques across the way, and behind it, a blacksmith shop and place to get organic supplies for the garden.

Anyway, while we were in California, a big storm blew out our Apple router, so no internet connection, a critical communication feature at our house.  This meant a trip to the Apple Store which took us right by The Bradford Store, and I needed to check with Kelly anyway because the coop to which we both belong was delivering that week.  While we were there, for some reason, perhaps only because it was time, or because I had been to San Francisco and "anything seemed possible", I asked Kim Bradford if she was still interested in a trial run of Briarpatch coffee.  She and a local farmer were busy unloading some beautiful ears of corn, but she looked up and quickly said yes.  We had talked about this a couple of years ago when we were both selling at the Huntersville Farmer's Market, but until now, I haven't felt well enough physically to make the commitment (hooray for getting one's thyroid function where it needs to be - another subject entirely.)

I don't know if you have ever done this, but it was as if my mouth flew open of its own accord.  I'm a planner, I mean a real planner.  I am never happier than when charting with a ruler and colored pens, making all manner of lists.  I don't always follow these plans, you understand, but that isn't entirely the point.  The making of the plans is where the real enjoyment lies.  Well anyway, my mouth flew open and asked the question, and there was no plan.  

None.  I had not done an inventory of the green coffee supply.  I have been hand labeling the bags.  I had not thought about marketing, as I've had all the business I wanted through word of mouth.  Suddenly, only after initiating all this, did the realization dawn:  Oops, I've got some catching up to do.

So, to make a week of focused activity short: despite years of disdaining same, Briarpatch Bakery and Beans now has a facebook page:  www.facebook.com/BriarpatchBakeryAndBeans, through which I've already gotten all manner of encouragement.  Thanks to Archana there is a website in the making.  I'm working on a new design for the bags. . .

God willin' and the creek don't rise, The Bradford Store will have Briarpatch Coffee tomorrow. . .all supportive incantations appreciated!

P.S.  Meanwhile, Mama has new hearing aids, and despite the fact that "the Queen" (Mom parlance for the director) showed up at her door with a a delegation of fellow residents to let her know she had hurt their feelings ("couldn't have been that bad," Mom said, "some of them were smiling, a little"), she seems to be doing better.  She did refer to her current digs as "the hell hole," but only a few times and that is an improvement.

Update. . .

I have been waiting until I had something to say, but since December and the last blog post, evidently nothing in my world has wanted to become story.  That hasn’t changed, really,  I am just getting a little worn out by the drought, by the lack of communication, the lack of digging down deep for the right word.  So this might be a little choppy as I wiggle down into a groove. I think the camera is down there somewhere, so stay tuned for visual aids. . .

And it isn’t really true that nothing has happened.  The rose-breasted grosbeaks flew through last week, the Paris Fashion Week of birds;  their black and white bodies splashed with a chest blaze of deepest pink.  How is that possible?  True to their couture nature, there are only a few, and they stay only briefly, on their way to more elegant climates.

There were three baby bunnies born under the back deck, and somehow, so far, the hawks have been distracted with other dinners.  Periodically, at dusk or in the early early morning, we will see gradually bigger rabbits under the bird feeders.

A couple of weeks ago, the goldfinches came through in a rush, emptying thistle feeders in a single day, here long enough to change from winter dull to startling yellow.  All three bluebird houses, right now, have parents slithering through the hole to feed little grey furballs of birds-to-be.  And just for our amusement, there is a house sparrow nest in the mouth of a giant metal chicken on the front porch.  

The old-fashioned irises have come and gone, the lavender ones under the maple and the cream and taupe ones in the big garden that break your heart with their scent of a grandmother’s perfume.  The winter kale is reaching to the skies with thick stalks and sweet yellow flowers.  I’m letting that garden go for awhile just for the bees.  The spring kale in the two cold frames is starting to realize the weather is too warm for its liking and I’ll need to finish harvesting in the next few days.  We ended up with continuous kale both because we like it and because I don’t do the kind of meticulous planning that a real farmer would.

I’m always kind of surprised by the garden.  It is always doing something unexpected and it doesn’t wait for me.  It doesn’t wait for me to realize it is time to plant this or harvest that.  It just goes on, independently, growing the seeds that happen to show up, without prejudice.

I could learn from that.  Whatever comes through, in its time, is fine.

I haven’t been so accommodating.  I didn’t want to go to Tennessee when my mother ended up in the hospital recently. I say “ended up” because it still isn’t exactly clear whether she engineered the little sidetrip away from her assisted living home, against which she seems to be constantly rebelling.  She just  turned ninety, and to celebrate the occasion she has started to use the “N” word, and had to be forcibly wheeled out of the dining room because she started yelling. The director pushed Mom in her wheelchair back to her apartment and got her into her recliner.  She had to leave for a moment and when she returned, Mom was sitting in the floor, claiming she had fallen, sitting in a position curiously like someone would be who had scooted herself into the floor.

Mom ended up in the hospital this last time because when her afternoon caregiver arrived on this particular day, Mom was breathing heavily and the caregiver couldn’t get her attention.  They both went to the emergency room, but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong, but at ninety, they admit you anyway.  She was there for a week, with all manner of tests, meals brought to her in bed, a bevy of nurses commenting on her sweet smile.

When my sister Laura and I got there the morning after admission she told us she had gin in her hospital water carafe and that she had been on a ride in a casket.  I don’t know where the gin came from for as far as I know, since my Dad died, my mother has a decided preference for Kendall Jackson Chardonnay.  It was Kendall Jackson they took away from her about a month after she got to assisted living.  Evidently she was coming back from breakfast and drinking and dialing, going through her address book, calling people to come get her.

That may have been when her minister decided to stop coming to see her.  We’re not sure.  All we know is that it is now the assistant minister’s job and her visits seem to have slacked off as well. Anyway, at the close of last week’s Hospital Spa Vacation, the doctor said Mom had the beginnings of both congestive heart failure and “mild dementia.”

“Ha!” said the director of the assisted living place.  “Ha!” said their director of nursing.  “She knows exactly what she is doing.”  I guess the story of the casket ride convinced the doctor, and it couldn’t have helped that Mom’s hearing aids went completely dead, even with new batteries, so all the information she had to comment upon started out in her own head. True for me too sometimes.

So we are all along for the ride it seems.  Us, Mom, the kale, the new birds and bunnies.

It really has been a glorious Spring.  And now that I’ve broken the ice, maybe I can tell you about it more often.