Couldn’t resist playing around a little bit with the moon just a day from full…

…and now rather tired to blog about it…here it is by the river at a spot I cleared for it: …and here’s the view from the bench, after a few drinks:

After a couple of days of much-needed rain, this is what was left hanging over our house: Just warms the cockles, doesn’t it?

A recent cool find in our CSA box of deliciousness. (We called them THE LOVERS. Then we ate them.)

Tobacco is over 3′ tall now: Spearmint discovered for us by our friend Christina: I can’t wait for these…I mean really can’t wait; I chopped up a couple of half-grown ones to throw into pasta sauce the other night: Apples apples apples…making apple-blackberry sauce as fast as I can: The hot peppers just keep on coming: The corn is actually turning into….corn! I’ve been picking all the broccoli flowers about once a week, and they just keep cranking out more: I was not the first to discover this pumpkin flower:

Whenever I encountered a passage in a book that spoke of air “sweet as wine”, I thought it was just hyperbole. Even on camping trips in upstate NY, the lack of the city’s hydrocarbon stench was as close as it came. Here it’s different. I start most days with a trip to the garden to admire it and pick the sweet-tart cherry tomatoes that give meaning to the neologism “mouthgasm”, and today it was cold (though we’ll be sweating in the noontime sun in a few hours). My breath coalesced before me, I shivered, and merely sipped enough air to sustain metabolic processes. Then I noticed the smell; clear, filtered by millions of trees and plants, a hint of the musky duff that makes a thick carpet under the fir trees down by the river, a subtle tinge of ozone despite the cloudless sky, the distinctive smell of tomato plants on my fingers and the onmipresent aroma of the evergreens that tower all around us. I breathed deeper; for a time, my hyperactive nature relented and pulling in huge lungfuls of this nectar was enough activity, and there was nothing else that seemed to need doing, no need to analyze or plan or give attention to anything but the air. Breathing became a meditation in a totally natural way – no need to chant in some arcane language, nor to push errant thoughts from my mind. Just pleasure in being alive. What more could I ask for than to live in a place where life’s most basic, unavoidable necessities bring such pleasure? Gods, what a crunchy granola boy I’ve become in my middle age! Even as part of me quietly mourns the closing of CBGBs and the recent passing of its owner Hilly Kristal.