Edna

My right hand has sort of become the center of my life. Just enter our kitchen and you'll see my whole home-therapy station, complete with a pot of beans, scar cream, hand lotion, heat pad, cold compress, and exercise manual.

In the end it's just a classic case of "you never realize how much you use it until you don't have it". Thankfully I have little pain but I'm still always conscious about it and my eyes can't stop looking at the T shaped scar that's dotted with little stitch marks. It's like having a loose tooth in your mouth that your tongue can't stop playing with.

Every day I do therapy five times a day and at least ten people ask me how my hand is. That probably already adds up to at least a few hours of totally wrist-focused behavior per day. Then on top of that, twice a week I go see my therapist and we talk about my wrist for an hour straight. Tendons this, nerves that, etc, etc, etc. It completely fascinates me. Rawley says I was the happiest post-surgery patient he's ever seen and therefore thinks I should be a doctor. (We shall see about that).

But in all honesty, my injury has brought me almost as much good as bad. I look forward to going to therapy so I can see the progress I've made, the new exercises I'll have to do, the other patients that will be there and most of all to see my therapist. I'm starting to build a good relationship with her and we love talking with each other. Among other things we talk mostly about my work, the wonders of the Capay Valley, and all the discoveries her eight-month old is making. We talk about the pesticides that fill the central valley and how she's worried for her baby having to ingest them, but how at the same time all the organic food is so expensive. I can't wait to bring her a fresh basket of organic strawberries next week.

Warming and Swarming

Exhaustion. Today was the first day of real heat. And by real heat I don't mean the soft relaxing sun that comes at the beginning of spring, I mean heat that you can no longer enjoy. Bending over picking spinach, tokyo turnips, lettuce, sugar snap peas or whatever else it might be, the sun beats down relentlessly on your back, slowly covering your body in a thick layer of pure salt. Starting as early as nine in the morning, the intensity keeps climbing and doesn't stop until around 3 in the afternoon.

Bent over for a number of hours doing some flower transplanting, I was starting to feel like I was at my breaking point when all of a sudden I began to hear a loud and unfamiliar noise. It was like a thousand vibrations and suddenly the air seemed to come to life. My eyes finally left the crumbly dry soil I had been staring at since 11am and I looked up to see the huge swarm of bees that out of nowhere began to fill the air around us. Stuck in their cloud, we watched as they zoomed around in a frenzy, darting and swooping around. We imagined the queen bee somewhere amongst them but they turned circles around us and left us spinning before we could even begin to look more closely. After a few minutes, the swarm finally moved further away and we resumed work until we eventually forgot about them.

Hours later on our afternoon break, I lay down in the shade of one of the large walnut trees to escape the sun. I lay back to enjoy the breeze that was now starting to trickle in and at that moment I noticed one of the tree branches had an extra fuzzy mass covering it. I squealed and pointed upwards so that Rawley and Catalina could see where our new friends had chosen to live. Catalina was not so thrilled by the fact that they had chosen a spot so close to her work place but Rawley and I promised each other we will come back to visit often.

Bright lights

Last night I went to go see the Esparto High production of Alice in Wonderland. Today I felt like I was living in some sort of modern wonderland:

Pulling up to my oh so familiar driveway in Berkeley this morning I felt a sudden surge of emotion to see my faithful little yellow house waiting just where I had left it. I felt happy to have come back just in the nick of time to experience my favorite time of year at the Francisco house. Just like at the farm, all the flowers were popping and the green garlic that I had planted months ago resembled the plants I had just harvested the day before for the CSA boxes.

As soon as I arrived (of course only after showering my dog with infinite kisses), I quickly changed into my city appropriate attire so that we would be on time for our San Francisco tea party invitation. After a long day of chatting and then being stuck in the city's traffic we came home a bit exhausted only to see that I had left my car windows down and my ipod in the middle of the seat. These days at the farm I've become accustomed to leaving everything everywhere. As soon as the engine turns off, I toss the keys in the cupholders and fling my purse and ipod onto the passenger seat. I would never even think twice about leaving my brand new laptop sitting out in the backseat or my cell phone on the dashboard.

Similarly, Rawley said he was baffled when he came to Oakland last weekend for a backyard grill party only to find his best friend grilling eggplants over the coals. "Our eggplants are only four inches tall right now!" He explained as he wondered at the silly concept of those large purple lumps he saw grilling.

Secret

Every time I think I'm starting to know everything like the back of my hand around here, I find something I haven't discovered yet. Today while filling flats in the old barn, my big bro showed me where the barn owls live. My eyes searched the rafters where Rawley had pointed to and I finally located the serene being.

She sat poised at the very far end of the barn, next to an opening where the light streamed in. In the instant I saw her, it felt as though she understood everything. I stared at the creamy tan owl as though in a trance, watching her as she sat soaking up the day. It was stunning to look at her there by the window, her beauty and grace both absolutely hypnotizing. I felt her royal poise emanate and it felt as though I had been let in on a big secret.

Fuzzy pods

With cottonwood flurries blowing around our feet and wood doves fluttering overhead to find a place for the night, my big brother taught me how to open up the premature almonds for a tasty snack. A big branch that hung over the trail to Rawley's trailer was heavy with fuzzy green pods and he reached up to pick one and cut it open. Inside a thick layer of soft white flesh engulfed a tiny creamy white almond. With a flick of his wrist he pried it out and I popped the watermelon rind tasting thing into my mouth.

Cackles

Today I laughed harder than I have in many months. Squeezed in the back of the pickup my ribs heaved and tears dripped from my eyes as I tried to hold the milk bucket still out the window. Both Rawley and Luke came to help me milk today since I can only milk with one hand and therefore go half as fast. (Although if I concentrate sometimes I can beat him!) With only two and a half people on the way back we didn't have a way to carry the milk since Mapache, Arnica and Pinto together produced six buckets. While Rawley drove carefully holding one of the milk pails, Luke held his bucket out the other window. Me being the smallest I climbed into the tiny back seat of the cab and sat backwards so that I could manage to fit my left hand (the good one) out of Luke's window. All crammed and howling with laughter we slowly made our way back to the farm only to find that we couldn't untangle ourselves too easily...

busy monday

A few things:

1) With rain due to come in a matter of hours, everything was on high alert. The pre-precipitation frenzy meant that most of us spent the entire day transplanting whatever we could get our hands on. (Corn, melons, statice, tomatoes, calendula etc.) It was great to finally see all our hard work in the greenhouses finally pay off.

2) More proof that Rawley should actually be my brother: today as we were transplanting melons with the water wheel, I was singing Jorge Drexler under my breath and he actually knew what song it was!

3) The lamb herd has been moved right below my trailer so I get to watch them chew on the trees. At this very moment Tiny D and Hazel are touching noses.

Up in flames

Rawley's friend Luke came on Thursday. Like Rawley he has the same skinny and tall build, so much so that they even joke that they are from the same stock, the skinny chicken leg stock.

He works at fancy restaurants as a barista.

Today the three of us went out to hike the Arbuckle Grade with Nellie. After kidnapping her in Rawley's new ride, we rode a few miles north to Rumsey and across the troll bridge to start our hike. The way up was sweltering hot but beautiful. Besides the turkeys and turkey vultures, we were completely alone in the dry heat until we encountered a gang of dirt biking teenagers and two men in a black pickup. Rawley of course commented on how vulnerable we were being all alone in the woods and mentioned how he had run into another person with an ATV and a rifle on another hike he had been on. Of course we were completely fine and made it up to the top of the ridge where we could see the entire Capay Valley in all its beauty. After locating Full Belly from those heights we noticed a huge plume of dark smoke not so far away. On the ride home, the smoke could even be seen above the trees so being the pyros that we are, we decided to go check it out. Stopping first at the Guinda Corner Store for some post-hike ice-cream, we watched Cole speed by in his bright yellow volunteer firefighting suit as we listened to the store women gossiping abut the fire. Apparently some people had wanted to burn some brush and then the fire had gotten out of control. Smelling the smoke beginning to waft through the store door we rushed out to the car to go see the fire for ourselves. We rounded the bend in the creaky Mercedes and all of a sudden the smoke was billowing above us in a seventy foot plume. A small house and some horses stood in the foreground and three kids threw a baseball around in the garden as though completely oblivious to the roaring fire behind them. But as we drove further down the road we could see behind the house to the big flames that jumped and twitched in a blazing orange mass.

Eggs-actly!

Forgot to mention a near catastrophe yesterday at lunch. With so many broken eggs that we can't sell at market I decided to make a crazy dessert item for lunch. If I haven't already said it, dessert has become close to obligatory now. Alex started it by making his signature chocolate chip cookies every lunch and since then it has taken off.

Well anyway, yesterday I decided to make meringues. The flavor turned out well but the presentation was a bit sub-par. The insides were deliciously gooey with a crunchy shell but as soon as we scraped them off the sheet they shriveled into tiny crumpled morsels.

After using up so many egg whites I decided something needed to be done about the yolks so I set off making an "eight yolk delight" with my last fifteen minutes. Being a bit rushed I read the first half of the recipe and then accidentally jumped to the second half of a completely different recipe! Instead of throwing it away I ended up spooning the thick, yellow, cookie batter-like substance into a pan just to try my luck and I'm glad I did because it didn't turn out quite as puke-alicious as I had expected. To my surprise it was not all that bad, just a bit plain and dense. Rawley convinced me to then spruce it up and serve it at his lunch today with a creamcheese frosting and some strawberries on top.

A warm day

The light is just at that perfect tipping point, there's still enough light to see but the bats are starting to come out and shadows begin to stealthily swallow the orchard around us. The heat of the day is still in the air and on our faces. A circle of hay bales surrounds a roaring campfire which sparks dangerously close to Rawley's fiddling elbow. I'm surrounded by kids and while they do their twists and flips I dosey doe to the music and inhale the elation that the kids seem to give off.

family tree

Update: Rawley and I are officially siblings now. After Chyca once called him my brother a few months ago, everyone's taken to grouping us as brother and sister.