The sunlight through the half-opened blinds splashed across my face and began to wake me to the warm scent of sex.
Through the open window competing songs of rival birds drifted into the room. I rolled over to touch her and found a warm, but empty space. The smell of coffee and fresh bread pulled me out of bed and down the stairs to the kitchen.
I didn't bother to dress.
I stopped and looked into the kitchen from the hallway door. Standing at the sink she was washing and slicing the melons and raspberries I'd picked yesterday. Now, it was my turn to watch her, returning the favor, I guess, from her watching me yesterday. A Watching which led to one of the steamiest and most satisfying sexual circuses we've had in the 10 years we've been married.
I am a carpenter. I make furniture for the newly rich people in this suburban outpost of Boston. Most of my customers are almost completely without taste or sense or awareness of proportion. They don't even know what they like. They only know that since they've got money, now, they need to show it, loading up on New England antiques and custom-built furniture.
"Can you duplicate this? I really like how it looks in this picture." I am handed a copy of a Martha Stewart or Better Homes magazine.
I used to try to change their minds, to make them think about the whole interior, both the built and natural environment around them. I tried to persuade them to purchase furniture that respects their interior environment.
I don't do that anymore, try to get them to do it right. It just annoys them.
Instead I apologize to the wood for turning it into something with no integrity.
Besides I've got a wife, 2 kids, 2 horses and an un-numbered quantity of other four-legged creatures. And they all like to eat on a regular basis. Holding out for good taste and good quality is not the way to keep them fed.
I am a carpenter. I work in wood. But in truth I have the soil in my genes.
My family have been farmers for as long as anyone knows, reaching back behind history into the sagas of my ancestral homeland in Norway. Even though I've lived most of my adult life in the city I can take one look at the crops of the truck farms here in New England and know exactly what the farmer is doing right or wrong.
Most of them make the mistake of putting all their energy and money into the plants they grow--and it shows. Unnaturally green or overly lush foliage with stunted or humongous but tasteless vegetables.
Long ago in Norway and again in Illinois, my ancestors learned that if you focus on the crop you'll lose it.
"It's the soil, the soil, the soil," papery Norwegian accents whisper from deep in my brain.
"We take care of the soil." A Norwegian farmer's mantra. They had so little soil in old rocky Norway, they had no choice.
An aeon ago, in some brief Norwegian summer between the snows of spring and the snows of fall, we learned that the earth is alive and needs to be fed. When it is fed, and if the rains are fair, the earth give us all we need for food, for taste, for scent, for texture, and color.
I think Americans are too much in love with the store. With the things they can buy. Not make. They pour or pile or spread synthetic chemicals everywhere. They think to feed their plants and kill the bugs and weeds.
But they don't. They kill the soil, kill the earth, leaving it like dry husks of November corn. The strong late-season wind, out of mercy or cruelty I don't know which, picks up the dead and dry soil and carries it aloft a billion acres at a time. Without ceremony or remembrance it buries our once living soil in distant oceans.
I don't really have time for it, but every year I plant a few acres of food crops, as well as hay for my kids' horses. What I can't harvest I plow under in the fall when I plant a cover crop of rye and clover. This late fall planting grows up just enough to protect the ground from the winter wind and feeds the soil when it I plow it under in the spring.
I have soil in my genes and I like to think the earth in my few acres of Massachusetts is glad this Viking son, too stubborn to listen to the yakking nonsense of Agri-business, has settled here.
Yesterday, after work I took off my shirt for the heat, still high at 6:00 pm, took a long thick steel bar I'd borrowed from a neighbor and tried for the umpteenth time to move that damned New England boulder from the center of my corn. Last year it was still mostly hidden in the soil, just one jagged edge sticking up as if to cut the sky if it got too close. But winter's heaves brought that sucker up so I couldn't ignore it anymore.
I know I'll have to bring a backhoe in here, but I hate doing anything in my fields that isn't powered by my own flesh and muscle and blood. Or that of my horses. I've been digging all summer, hammering and cold-chiseling, but I'm not getting anywhere. So, if Archimedes could move the earth with a lever long enough and a place to stand, I figured I could maybe move this sumbuck with one.
With ice tea in a jug and a white, virginal shift-type dress she wore on steamy days like this she came out to sit on another boulder under an apple tree and watch me struggle.
She got a kick out of watching me work and sweat and swear. She knew I'd eventually give up, but that my stubborn Scandinavian pride and belief in human muscle and hard work would push me to my limit first.
This stubbornness about the soil, the fields and all amused and puzzled her. She couldn't figure out why I persisted when it didn't matter to anyone else on earth whether or not I used a gasoline tiller or even grew a single potato.
My labor wasn't really feeding anyone, except maybe the kids' horses. Most of what I grew I gave away to people who'd just as easily buy from the store. I would pull out the best stuff and set it aside to bring down to the church for Boston's homeless, but I don't know if that made any difference. I don't try to explain anymore. It's just in the genes, that's all. The soil's in the genes.
Within two or three minutes my entire upper body was glistening with sweat; my face was red from exertion; the muscles of my shoulder and back rippled under my work-toughened skin. My jeans were soaked from the sweat cascading down my back and chest.
She stared hungrily as I planted my feet in the ground and bent over to pry below ground level. She watched my muscled butt, clearly defined by the tight denim. As I bent forward she could look beneath my jeaned rump and see the bulging fabric covering another sort of equipment between my legs.
