The Work That Looks Like Rest

I haven't written here in a while. Not because the farm went quiet — the opposite. The season got loud all at once, the way it always does, and the writing was the thing that waited.

I don't have many pictures to show for it either. But the few I have say more than I expected them to.

Here is the greenhouse at the start of a morning, before the day has decided what it wants to be. The seedling trays are lined up the length of the bench, the hanging baskets are just beginning to throw out their first vines, and the light comes through the poly soft and undecided. This is the part of the year that is all promise. Everything in that house is a sentence not yet finished.

And here, in the tomato tunnel, is the end of that same sentence. The plants have climbed their strings nearly to the top now, leaning into each other down the whole length of the row. A few weeks ago they were the small green things in those trays. Now you can lose a person in them.

In between those two pictures — the trays and the jungle — is all the work nobody photographs. Which brings me to Cathy and Gabe.

If you glance at these two, you'd think they were taking a break. Gabe sitting back on the landscape fabric with a grin, Cathy on an overturned crate in the middle of the greens, hat down against the sun. They look like they've stopped.

They haven't. They're weeding.

That's the thing about this stretch of the season. The planting is mostly behind us and the harvest hasn't fully landed, and so the work that fills the days is the close, low, patient kind — the kind you do sitting down, hands in the row, pulling what doesn't belong so that what does can have its space. It is the least dramatic work on the farm and very nearly the most important. Nobody comes to a farm stand asking to see the weeding. But there is no full tomato tunnel without it.

Thirty-five years in, I've come to love that this work looks like rest. Maybe that's the part I most wanted to say after being away from this page so long. Some of what matters most is quiet. It bends down low. It doesn't ask to be noticed.

Cathy and Gabe were noticed today, though. By me, and now by you.

More soon — once the rows let me sit down for a minute myself.