Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [55]
Some of us were in fact sticking our fingers into the rhubarb-crisp pans to lick up crumbs when the music started. The three-year-olds were the first ones out on the flagstone dance floor, of course, followed closely by my seventy-five-year-old parents, the teenagers and the elders and the middle-aged, recklessly dancing across age categories. And it still didn’t rain. Nobody fell in the creek, nobody went hungry, and nobody’s husband refused to dance. When the night chilled us we built a huge bonfire, and nobody fell into that either. Midnight found me belting out backup harmonies with my cousin Linda to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones. The over-fifty crowd stayed on its feet until two in the morning. You get what you need.
I’d asked for no presents. The stuff-acquisition curve of my life has long since peaked and lately turned into a campaign against accumulation, with everyday skirmishes on the kitchen table. Not just mail and school papers, either, I mean stuff on that table. (Shoes, auto parts, live arthropods in small wire cages.) “No presents,” I said. “Really.” But here in Dixie we will no more show up to a party empty-handed than bare-bottomed, because that’s how we were raised. A covered dish is standard, but was unnecessary in this case. To make everyone comfortable we had to suggest an alternative.
Camille made the call, and it was inspired: a plant. The tiniest posy, anything would serve. And truthfully, while we’d put prodigious efforts into our vegetable garden and orchards, our front yard lay sorry and neglected. Anything people might bring to set into that ground would improve it. Thus began the plan for my half-century Birthday Garden: higgledy-piggledy, florescent and spontaneous, like friendship itself.
This is what my friends brought: dug from their own backyards, a division of a fifty-year-old peony, irises, a wisteria vine, spicy sweetshrub, beebalm, hostas, datura, lilies, and a flowering vine whose name none of us knows. My parents brought an Aristocrat pear, a variety bred by an old friend from our hometown. A geographer friend brought Portuguese collards, another indulged my fondness for red-hot chile peppers. Rosemary and sage, blueberry and raspberry, fountain grass, blue sweetgrass, sunshine-colored roses, blue-and-white columbines, scarlet poppies, butterfly bush and “Sunset” echinacea—the color scheme of my garden is “Crayola.” Our neighbor, to whom we’d taken the tomato plant, dug some divisions of her prettiest lemon lilies. “Oh, well, goodness,” I said as I received each of these botanical gifts. “Well, look at that.”
I thanked my parents for having me, thanked the farmers for the food, thanked family and friends for the music, the dancing, the miles traveled, and the stunning good luck of having them all in my life. But I did not say “Thank you” for a plant. My garden lives.
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Happy Returns
BY CAMILLE
Birthdays have always been a big deal in my family. Mom would cook exactly what we wanted for dinner and bake any kind of cake for Lily and me on our special days. Our only limit was the one-year, one-person rule: each year I could invite as many people to my party as the age I was turning. So, three kids at my three-year-old party, ten at my tenth. As you can probably guess, things got increasingly wild. At one point I remember asking, “Mama, when I turn thirty can I really have thirty people at my party?” I was shocked when she said,