I open a book

Birthday camping, farms, and sidewalk raspberries

It’s my birthday. Andy drops me and Theo at the reptile feeding at Pocahontas State Park while he sets up our tent. Pool, grill, s’mores while the kids collect pinecones and get progressively more loopy, the Richmond Symphony while the sky is blue and the trees are so green it takes me back to Williamsburg in May when graduation is almost there and the air smells damp and wet and full of everything good. I wake up when it starts to rain and thunders exactly once and then stops to let us pack up and head home.

I spent the evening with art major friends from college. It’s the third time we’ve hung out since I moved here, we rotate houses and talk. Alix put watercolor supplies out that we eventually used to doodle as we talk about MFAs and Yates and people we knew / know.

Celeste Farms, Shalom Farms, our tiny garden. Spending time in farms this week and thinking about the people who pick our food and grow it and get it to us. Food that we take for granted. Food that my 1 year old sometimes drops on the floor because she thinks it is funny. How I wish I could explain to her how precious it is. That there are kids who are leaving us because they are being starved. How the people who pick these tomatoes are being chased down. How easily we forget how things get into our hands.

Sat in a cold plunge surrounded by wild flowers and fields and the smells of burning wood on Sunday evening. Sat besides friends I didn’t know this time last year. We’ve been in Richmond officially one year this week.

Theo asks me if he can eat the blackberry that is draped over into the sidewalk. Like a long arm that is holding it out just for him. There are thousands on this block and I say yes. The branch is reaching out asking us to try. The birds recognize this as a request, so we do too.

We are harvesting green beans from our front garden and this is the first time I have seen Theo willingly, excitedly eating this vegetable.

I wonder if waking up outside ever gets old? I remember camping every night for one week in high school when I biked from NJ to DC with classmates and teachers and learned about history along the way. I can still remember waking up in Pennsylvania looking out on fields upon fields of farms and feeling the dew from the top of the tent spring off as we packed up.

How to combat feeling hopeless, sad, afraid for the fate of the world? Open up my art history textbook from high school to a random page and read about how people made sense of their world, then. Open up Daily Rituals by Mason Curry and read about how artists and writers kept working. Go to the library and get a nonfiction book on a topic I am interested but know little about - read a few pages and feel possibility. I open up a book.

We are picking blueberries at a farm tour our friend is giving us. My favorite is seeing how broccoli grows. And how the tomato fields smell.

Andy says, “We got so lucky with neighbors, didn’t we?”