City Mouse, Country Mouse
Who would think it strange, that in my car yesterday, along with a week’s worth of banana peels, a month’s worth of junk mail, probably a stray cigarette butt which if found by my wife or daughters would be a sure ticket to a bad day, empty peppermint tins, two dried and halved milkweed pods so wonderfully suggestive of something, two large paper bags which once held fifty pounds each of C&H sugar and which are now partially filled with the husks of beans from a Theobroma Cacao tree, a gallon sized baggie filled with the stems and seeds of cayenne peppers and the skins of vanilla beans, and lastly, a large black plastic trash bag filled with 30 to 40 pounds of horse manure? Not strange to me. No, that is not entirely true. In fact, this is all very strange to me, now that I think about it. And yesterday I flip-flopped between amusement and bewilderment a couple of times, trying to recall exactly how all this had come to pass, how all the bizarre contents of my car had ended up there yesterday, when my daughter pierced the bubble of my reverie by saying, “Can we take your car, mine’s a mess.”
I used to live in the city. Now I live in a place where the only concrete for miles around is the floors of my various garages and some in the aisle of the barn and some I poured along the wall of the chicken coop in an attempt to keep out predators. I have the great good fortune to grow hay and peppers and potatoes and rhubarb (I am not an ambitious gardener) and to have the time to read David Grayson by the fire–his words of quiet wisdom gleaned from his self-exile from the madding world at the turn of the century, not the most recent, but the one before, to a farm in the east where, when he wasn’t plowing or strolling or helping neighbors, he read Montaigne by his fire. I’m sometimes able to pretend that I am a gentleman farmer. I am only as busy as I want to be. I used to live in the city. I am a lucky man, not a rich man—my wife is certain that we will be homeless just at the time when most of our friends will be retiring comfortably. They’ll be off to Palm Springs for the winter and we’ll be battling frostbite and horrendously sad foot sores, she must think. No; I am a rich man, and I aint talkin’ some groovy, new-age, spiritual definition of rich, or maybe I am, because now I’m thinking about the loaves and fishes. (David Grayson’s “real” name was Ray Stannard Baker and he was one of the first prominent journalists to write about race relations in America at the turn of that older or younger century.)
So what about the damn contents of the car, and what do they have to do with anything?
Well . . .
It’s not that I am busy, but I am always late so my diet consists mostly of bananas, and I’m not very neat. Junk mail: it piles up. Cigarettes? How did that get there?. Peppermints? instead of chewing tobacco. The milk weed pods? Everyone knows now that the Monarch butterfly’s survival is dependent on the milkweed plant which is vanishing because of the use of Roundup, and I was walking by a lonely milkweed plant in mid-February, glanced at it and felt suddenly warm despite the cold because I thought the insides of those desiccated pods look an awful lot like Georgia O’Keefe’s flowers. Husk of cocoa beans? That’s a longer story. The profession in which I strived to make a living for so many decades no longer exists really, or not, at least, in any form that I recognize. I used to contribute to the production of images and text on paper. So I lost my job the day my brother died and was unemployed for close to two years. Then one day I happened to hear that my former employer had also given up on the printin’ business and had started a bean-to-bar chocolate operation. Lucky for me, it wasn’t too hard to convince him that I could transition or retrain myself from being an electronic prepress technician to washing dishes and mopping floors. And now! And now I spend my days sorting cacao beans and cracking and winnowing beans and pouring 20 pounds of liquid chocolate from melanger to tray and making truffles and wrapping chocolate bars and stirring chocolate syrup and grinding locally grown cayenne peppers to spice up the chili chocolate, which pleasant as that sounds can be hazardous to ones sinuses, and washing dishes which I find most peaceful, and mopping the floor which I find most satisfying at the end of a long day of making chocolate.
See, it’s like this: my wife and I were walking through the pasture after turning the horses out and I spied some trash caught in a shrub. What I thought was trash turned out to be a mylar, helium-filled balloon with big cursive words spelling out, “It’s a Boy”. So we’re discussing ways to keep predators from killing our spring chicks, when I think: “What about a scarecrow with second-hand helium-filled mylar balloons for head and hands?” This aint serendipity, folks, this here is a series of unsolicited epiphanies, brought to you by the fact that what they say about hope is true! What do they say? Something about the springiness of hope? Something about hope and resurrection and spring and time?
There is always hope. And it is springy.
Oh yeah, the horse manure. My boss at the chocolate factory and I were talking about rhubarb, and she was remembering her auntie who had a connection at the seattle zoo which had an endless supply of zoo-doo. And I was telling her about the magical rhubarb forests that grow below the barn in my friend’s childhood mountain home. So as my boss was beautifully enrobing chocolate truffles in her most artistic way (we call her “Maestro” behind her back because she doesn’t like titles) she says, “So you have horses, right?” So she gives me money to work in her chocolate factory, and I give her my best effort and forty pounds of horse manure. For her rhubarb.
Anyway, I knew a guy who once lived in the city who didn’t have much to say for almost 50 years, until he moved the country and got kicked in the head by a horse. And today my car is clean as a whistle, and my daughter and I went to Nuance Chocolate Company in Fort Collins, Colorado to share a Snakebite truffle and a Sipping Chocolate.
"Papa? The room is vibrating!"
"Uhoh, you may have had too much!"
Luck, hope, chocolate and change. Savor responsibly.