Sights and sounds of a Greenback summer

Few days bring with them the fullness of this one.

After a (wonderful, rich, overwhelming) long, hectic time at Bonnaroo (posts to come), I spent most of today in the hamlet of Greenback on Cherry Corner Farm. After a full night's sleep, I woke up to a sunshiny yard and eager chickens ready to forage--one of life's most meaningful pleasures is watching a flock of chickens fan out over a stretch of green, fluffing their feathers like their lives depend on it, and getting their breakfast of clover, plantain and grasshoppers. Hardly a cursory glance at their liberator, though, but they show gratitude with scandalously orange-yolked eggs. Heaven.

In the weeks I've been gone, the tomatoes, peppers and okra have skyrocketed, and the black-eyed peas have asserted themselves--I've never seen such deep green foliage on such small sprouts! Over the last couple of years, we've gradually fed our red-clay plot with a feast of chicken manure, mushroom compost and kitchen scraps, and the bricklike soil is beginning to give way to something nurturing. The terraced strawberry bed next to it is all played out, but its horse manure-and-mushroom compost substrate coaxed an overabundance of the most delicious berries this year--the ones we didn't freeze or eat fresh ended up in some wonderful pies, though it took herculean self-restraint to not just scarf the sun-warmed morsels right there among the plants.

So today, after a necessary trip to Knoxville, Dad and I went on a mission to gather creek cane/bamboo poles for the garden beans. During Mother's Day weekend, when my sister and I snuck our brothers back into TN to surprise Mom, we had all gone on a hike and found a canebreak about a half-mile from the house. Of course, then there was much less underbrush and an exponentially less significant carpet of poison ivy, so today's little jaunt turned into rather a war of nature and human fortitude. Dad had his machete, and I my watchful eye (snakes, beaver stumps, muskrat holes--treacherous stuff!) and together we wove our way through the woods. We came upon a couple of patches of wild monarda, and some jewelweed growing, inexplicably, in a cedar bald. We sidestepped a patch of mayapple, found a small stand of horse-chestnut trees, and admired a fallen sycamore before we finally found the patch across the creek and got to work. Dad cut canes while I stripped them (mostly) of their leaves, and we each took a big underarmful and negotiated our way back over the water. We cut a hilarious picture coming back--completely inelegantly tromping our way through the woods, dragging these piles of bamboo, trying not to drop anything or kill ourselves falling. But we made it to his truck with everything, much to the beans' pleasure, I'm sure.

After a quick shower--damn that poison ivy--I went down the road to visit my friend Janet and her boys, Devon and Rowan, both of whom I babysat for years after their births. Janet and I sat and talked on the side of Lake Leech (really a beautiful place!) as they played in their inflatable raft, and I'm not sure if I felt more awe or pride. So intelligent and kind and considerate and fun--wonderful boys, and so old and autonomous. I feel guilty for having spent so little time with them, and they were falling over each other to tell me everything I've missed during all the time I've been gone. Back at their house, Janet and I sipped some fantastic ginger ale on the porch while the boys and their pack of dogs played in the yard. Their home is a 13-acre forested hill called Woodthrush Ridge, and while we sat and rocked, a male thrush made an unusually bold move to perch in the wide-open crown of a dead tree about 50 yards away; Janet grabbed her scope and zeroed in, and the way that bird sang was i.n.c.r.e.d.i.b.l.e! Their song is a disjointed series of different rhythms, pitches, tones and percussives, and they actually DANCE when they sing--he hunched his little shoulders, threw his head back, did a little shimmy and a shake. Amazing! By then, the sun was almost down, and the moon was up and full and pink, and we turned the scope on that too, to see all the crevices and craters shimmering with the heat of our atmosphere.

Earlier, on the way to meet Dad in the woods, I had run down a grassy path on the eastern side of the the pond; the sun was closing in on the west, and the path was warm and all the sweet piney grassy scent around me rose up and swept me on my way. In the moment, I laughed. It was perfect.