Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [54]
As the RSVPs rolled in, we called farmers to plead for more strawberries, more chickens. They kindly obliged. The week of the party, I cut from our garden the first three giant heads of Early Comet broccoli—plants we’d started indoors in February and set out into nearly frozen soil in March. Without knowing it, I’d begun preparing for this party months ago. I liked seeing now how that whole process, beginning with seeds, ending with dinner, fixed me to some deeper than usual sense of hospitality. Anyone who knows the pleasure of cooking elaborately for loved ones understands this. Genesis and connection with annual cycles: by means of these, a birthday could be more than a slap on the back and jokes about memory loss.
On Tuesday, four days pre-party, Camille and I hoed weeds from around corn seedlings and planted ten hills of melons for some distant, future party: maybe we’d have corn and cantaloupe by Lily’s birthday in July. By dusk the wind was biting our ears and the temperature was falling fast. We hoped the weather would turn kinder by this weekend. We expected well over a hundred people—about thirty spending the weekend. Rain would wreck any chance for outdoor dancing, and camping in the yard would be grim. We scowled at the clouds, remembering (ruefully) the cashier who’d jinxed the rain in Tucson. We weren’t in drought here, so we decided we could hope with impunity. And then take what came.
On Wednesday we checked the bean sprouts Camille had started in two glass gallon jars. Their progress was unimpressive; if they intended to fill out a hundred fat, translucent summer rolls in three days, they had some work to do. We tried putting them in a sunnier window, but the day was cloudy. Suddenly inspired, we plugged in a heating pad and wrapped it around the jars. Just an hour did the trick. I’m sure we violated some principle of Deep Ecology, but with just a quick jolt from the electric grid our sprouts were on their way, splitting open their seeds and pushing fat green tails into the world.
On Thursday I went to the garden for carrots, hoping for enough. With carrots you never know what you’ve got until you grab them by the green hair and tug them up. These turned out to be gorgeous, golden orange, thicker than thumbs, longer than my hand. Shaved into slivers with green onions and our indolent sprouts, two dozen carrots would be plenty. I could only hope the lambs and chickens were cooperating as well. I stood for a minute clutching my carrots, looking out over our pasture to Walker Mountain on the horizon. The view from our garden is spectacular. I thought about people I knew who right at that moment might be plucking chickens, picking strawberries and lettuce, just for us. I felt grateful to the people involved, and the animals also. I don’t say this facetiously. I sent my thanks across the county, like any sensible person saying grace before a meal.
Guests began to trickle in on Friday: extended family from Kentucky, old college friends from South Carolina, our musician friends John, Carrie, and Robert. I was bowled over by the simultaneous presence of so many people I care about, from as far away as Tucson and as near as next door. We made all the beds and couches, and pitched tents. We walked in the garden and visited. All those under age twelve welded into a pack and ran around like wild things. I overheard a small platoon leader in the garden command: “You, whatever your name is, go down that way and I’ll hide and we’ll scare the girls.” I only made two rules: Don’t injure each other, and don’t flatten the crops. With the exception of one scraped finger and the tiniest mishap with a Dolly Parton, they obliged.
We set up a sound system on the back patio, dragged bales of straw into benches, and eyed the sky, which threatened rain all day Saturday but by late afternoon had not delivered. We carried a horse trough out of the barn and filled it with ice to chill our Virginia Chambourcin