The Cage of Asparagus

It wasn't the best harvest season for my little asparagus plot this year.

It's been five years since I put that rootstock into the soil of a four by six bed, and I've been tending and feeding it ever since.  The first two years I just let the bed run, tall sprawling ferns rising taller than I.  For the last three, I've taken the first month of growth, a modest yield of tasty spears to begin the spring growing season.

This year, the weather has wildly oscillated, and the asparagus got a little caught out.  Two weeks of summer-warm heat back in April started the spring growth cranking, but things suddenly shifted back to near freezing many nights.  The surge which began with the ferocity of an advancing phalanx petered out to near nothing, with yields significantly below the prior two years.  

After four weeks of harvesting a small handful a day, I decided to call it.  I didn't want to strain the roots, pushing those plants to the point where I was actually harming them with my picking.   Like all living things, asparagus officinalis needs rest, needs a time of Sabbath from the demands of production.  If you take and take and take and take, what you end up with a dead plot the next year.

There's a metaphor in there for our compulsive busyness, I think. 

So I let the ferns grow, and set about building a structure around the bed to support their growth.  I've done this in prior years, as I realized that those six foot plus ferns weren't exactly stable.  As they leaned to the south to catch the light of the sun, they'd flop down onto neighboring beds, or collapse during high wind events.

The structure is made entirely of the growth of my garden, as I take the dried stalks of last year's sunflowers, a roll of garden twine, and with a little snipping and securing, hey presto, I've got a structural cage for asparagus.  They're stablised, protected from the wind and errant lawnmowers.

I suppose the next step would be to add a movable protective cover, to shield those delicate ferns in the event we get significant hail.

As every gardener knows, it's important to have an awning for the cage of asparagus.

Snow and Sabbath

The forecast for snow came midweek, as Rache and I were vacationing with old friends, enjoying the sweet warmth of the Caribbean in January.   Nothing could have seemed further from the sultry breezes kissing my cabin veranda on the Koningsdam than snow, but there it was.

Our algorithmic prognosticators suggested, as they often do, wildly catastrophic potential snowfalls.  Look at the European model!  Two feet!  Maybe three feet!  An inch of ice!  All of that, coupled with high temperatures far below freezing, and things looked "significant."  For the heart of the American South, things looked truly worse, far worse, as our Mid-Atlantic snow and sleet would come down mostly as freezing rain.  Then the whole mess would just stick around for days and days.

When was it arriving?  Saturday night.  When was it peaking?  Sunday morning into Sunday afternoon.  Of course.  

What a lovely time not to have access to cell service, I sighed.  

But shipboard wifi is a thing, now, so e-mails were sent back and forth, and after waiting to ensure that the forecast wasn't just a GPT hallucination, the decision was made to cancel services for the day.  Much of the concern among the elders was about my thirty seven mile journey to the church, which would take me down miles and miles of snow-covered back roads.

To be entirely honest, that drive would be a hoot.  The big beefy full-sized four-wheel drive Tahoe I rented when we arrived at Dulles would eat that up with a spoon.  I, in return, was more concerned about my folks.  I want no-one to slip and fall, or to strain a back.  I want no-one to get stuck, or to go sliding off the road into a ditch, as happened to a music director of ours years ago on a snowy Sunday morning.  Stay home.  Take care.

The question, then, became whether or not to attempt something virtually.  We've got a great streaming setup at the church, of course, with gimballed cameras and church folk who have technical skills beyond my meager abilities.   But again, folks would need to get to the sanctuary to do that, leaving me with the option of doing an early pandemic talking-head-style sermon from my laptop, which would then be booped up onto our YouTube.  

But the Mac I once used to design those services is long dead, and given my dying ancient Chromebook, this option gives me a bit of service-failure PTSD.  

So instead, the snow day will be a Sabbath, and the Sabbath will be a snow day.

Snow days were all Sabbaths, after all, back before the internet brought the blighted expectation that nothing should ever prevent us from working, that we should set our days into a drab endless sameness.

If there was no school, there was no school.  If getting to work was impossible or unwise, you just didn't work.  You shoveled out, which is exercise.  You helped your neighbors, and checked in on folks who might not be able to get out.  You got together with friends and went sledding.  If you had a 4x4 or were competent in the snow, you went out and ran errands for folks, stopping to help every stuck soul you met.  And after all of that, you got a fire going in the hearth, and got cozy.

And everything worked out fine.  The world kept turning.

As Ecclesiastes teaches, there are days that should be marked by difference.  We should approach life in ways appropriate to the season.

Work Breaks, the Law, and Sabbath Imperatives

It was Monday, and May-warm-lovely out, so it was a day for chores, both in the yard and in the house.

I don't mind them, to be honest, as they're just part of caring for one's little patch of land, but they do take energy.  I trimmed back bushes, cut back ivy, and cleared away the clippings.  I edged and mowed the front yard.  I emptied the kitchen compost bin into the compost pile, which I had turned with a pitchfork prior to burying that mess of semi-decomposed waste deep in the warm steaming pile.

It was the labor of an entire morning, and as I was my own boss, I took it at my own pace.

Being deep into the creaks and groans of middle age, that meant taking a pause every half hour or so.  I'd pop in the house for a sip of water, or to sit for a moment.  It'd be a minute or two or five, and then I'd bop back outside to get back into it.

That morning, I worked for about three hours.  I took at least three breaks of varying lengths.  When done, there were chores in the house...attacking the pile of dishes, vacuuming up the endless stream of hair that flows from our dog, walking said dog, feeding said dog, making dinner...and by the time the hour struck ten, I was ready to sleep.

Physical labor requires physical rest.  It's a basic reality.

Which is why I find myself fuddled by the latest kerfuffle coming from the big dangling nether states.  Texas and Florida legislatures have both recently made it illegal for counties to require water and rest breaks for farm workers.

Here, I confess to being of two minds.  Most of the souls whose hands and backs bring us our food are Latino, and many work here without the protections of citizenship.  There's a strong profit motivation for unscrupulous growers to take advantage of that status, knowing that people who fear summary arrest, detention, and deportation are far more likely to endure abusive work conditions.  Protecting those human beings would be best and first accomplished by providing a clear, sane, and open path to citizenship.  

As a still yet more important matter, ensuring humane working conditions seems necessary if you're not, well, evil.  If you can't run a business without inflicting harm on your workers, then that business is an abomination in the sight of the Lord.  Biblically speaking, I'm on solid ground here.

But...then there are the regulations being proposed.  'Cause the county regulations in question seem insufficient.  In Florida, they mandate one ten minute water and shade break every two hours.

This is...peculiar.  I mean, isn't it?  Am I wrong here?  I work outside in the summer on the regular, and that's just not quite enough, bro.  The hotter it gets, the more true that becomes.

Field work is physically intensive, and when temperatures rise into the 90s and 100s  (that's in the thirties, for the rest of the world), you've got to have water available all the time.  You've got to take shade breaks whenever you're feeling pressed.  When it's humid out, that gets even harder.

An employer who didn't provide access to water and shade as needed in the conditions that will increasingly become the norm in the American South wouldn't be doing their workers any favors.  With temperatures rising due to climate change (words redacted for Florida readers), any farmer or rancher who worked to the rule would find their workers struggling.  

Sure, the argument that county-by-county regulations are too scattershot might have validity.  But is it a real argument? Are the folks making that argument arguing for clearer federal and state level regulations, or suggesting that business should be utterly free?  Are they arguing that the biblical injunction to give adequate sabbath to laborers and to never ever oppress or profit maximize doesn't apply, because Reasons?

Then something rather different is at play.  

Sabbath, Chaos, and Control

As I continue on through Bill McKibben's difficult, disturbing Eaarth, my reflections on Maryann McKibben-Dana's (no immediate relation) book about Sabbath continue to echo about in my head.

One of the threads that repeated several times in that thought-provoking book was the idea of Sabbath as that place where we permit chaos to enter.  Sabbath becomes that place where we stop pouring ourselves into the structures that frame our lives, the schedules and demands and expectations that leave us continually anxious, ever behind, always stressed and struggling.  It is energy, not form.  It is freedom, not order.

I feel that, but I found myself wondering if it is something else.  A Sabbath day is not random, and it is not disordered.  It is free, yes, but when I take sabbath time...long meditative walks, times to write or draw, times to read and grow...they do not feel like chaos.  They feel calm.  They feel serene and ordered and at peace.

It's a different order.

The structure of sabbath matches the intent of creation.  Our crazy, competitive, acquisitive stresstival of striving does not.   It is a poor match for the Creator's intent.  It feels like chaos, or at least like a structure so poorly suited to change that it shakes us violently, tossing us about as it itself is tossed.

What does striving look like?  What does sabbath look like?  My mind went for visuals.   And as I thought that, I found myself drawing out an image from a movie, as I often do.   It was from the movie "Contact," a delightful bit of hard sci fi direct from the mind of dear ol' Carl Sagan himself.

In the scene, Jodie Foster is being sent to meet with extraterrestrial intelligences that have contacted humanity, in a device whose design has been provided by those intelligences.  Humanity has made one modification to that design:  the command chair in which she sits.

That chair, my metaphor-mind suggested, is our scheduled life.  And sabbath?  Sabbath arrives at the three minute mark of this little video snippet.