The day was going to be fiercely hot, stinky sticky smothering hot, with humidity in the eighties and real temperatures potentially cresting one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. It's the sort of day when spending time outside is best done early, the sort of day when the heat doesn't dissipate with the setting of the sun.
The last of the succulent deep-purple berries hung fat on my bushes, though, and my greenbeans were poppin', so there was harvesting to be done. After walking the dog, drinking my coffee, and attending briefly to the daily mess of world news, I took a couple of shiny metal bowls out into the yard and started picking.
I'd already pulled a gallon and a half worth of berries off of our two bushes, and so there wasn't much left worth plucking. Just about a cup of ripe fruit remained, the berries perfect and ready, popping off their stems with only the very lightest of effort. The dull faint tink of each falling fruit against the bottom of the stainless steel bowl was pleasing to the ear, chiming to mark the sultry end of my blueberry season.
Then it was on to my four by eight bean patch, where I squatted and plucked again, pinching beans from stems with thumb and forefinger. My trusty old bush beans, seedsaved for nearly a decade, were starting to produce.
As I picked, the heat continued to rise, and sweat prickled across my forehead beneath the shade of my hat-brim. I felt the effort in my middle-aged thighs as I squatted, moving counterclockwise around the raised bed. I peered into the dense interwoven foliage, gently parting it with my hand, eyes moving from bean to bean, my mind sorting between those that are ready and those worth leaving for another harvest later in the week. About a half-gallon of beans today, filling my larger bowl.
It's simple work, physical and wholly engaging. For forty five minutes or an hour before the heat of the day becomes too much, it's no great burden. But for a whole day? For eight hours, even with breaks? It would be utterly exhausting, and the endurance required to work in the fields seems...to my flaccid suburban flesh...herculean.
Gardening, I reflected as I popped plump beans into my bowl, is a good reminder of what it takes to bring food to our tables. It's the most fundamentally necessary labor, but also the labor that we've chosen to ignore as a society. It's viewed as unworthy of our effort, as the most menial and lowly of tasks, to be performed by those at the very bottom of the economic food chain. It is the work of migrants and the imprisoned, not that there seems much difference between those two categories in America these days.
That such labor is disrespected is an abomination. That it is a thousand times less lucrative than dooping around with some AI-enhanced blockchain folderol seems a perversion of the order of things. It's an inhuman and unnatural misvaluation. As a substantial portion of our culture turns snarling against those whose sweat and strain feeds it, this seems a form of madness. Is it seething resentment at our dependence, that we rely utterly upon the work of others, and that our "superiority" is nothing but a mask for our weakness? Perhaps.
Or perhaps we're just fools.
Perhaps we are as brimming with hubris as the Spartans, who imagined that their monomaniacal worship of Ares made them stronger than their slaves. For without the humble helots who grew the crops and tended the livestock, all the martial disciplines of Leonidas wouldn't have kept him alive for a week. Or are we like Midas, perhaps? Are we about to break our teeth on grapes gone hard to our touch, feeling our thirst rise as we peer down at the unquenching metal of our Mammonists desire that now fills our glass?
A little less time in the false halls of golden delusion might clear our addled minds, and return us to right appreciation of the things that matter.
A little more time in our gardens, with the fruit of the earth before us and sweet honest sweat on our brow.
Posts
