It’s Friday afternoon here on the farm, and a Facebook status tells me that a transmission line from Lynchburg is out and that’s why my microwave clock and modem light flickered out two hours ago.
So Meander and I did the only sensible thing available when our work is built online – we took to the couch with a book (Margaret Wrinkle’s Wash) and then took to a nap. It felt good.
In a few minutes, I’m going to carry a red pail around and gather more of the glass shards that glimmer on sunny days like this, remnants of the 100 years of garbage dumped here on the sloping hills.
It’s become a kind of adventure – this hunt for glass. It’s a signal to me that we’re not ready yet – not ready to put tiny pygmy goat hooves on the ground, not ready to set up campsites on the south side of the farm, not quite ready to be all we can.
But these sparkles also remind me of productivity – the glint and I bend. I can fill my hands in minutes and then tumble these shards into old lunch meat containers for P to carry home for recycling. (My county doesn’t recycle glass.) I can do this any day, easily, and it moves us forward. Bit by bit.
And it’s this forward that I need. Tiny shard by tiny shard, shimmering piece by shimmering piece . . . all the way to my dream.