Yet again I've managed to let a month slip by without a post. Between keeping up with the mini-farm and household chores while Charles slaved away at summer school and put in overtime at the office, my muse has been a bit suppressed. And while Martha has no doubt been spending many of her weekends hanging with the hoity-toities in the Hamptons or hiking the wooded clifftop trails of her Maine island retreat, I've spent just about every Sunday soused with Sailor Jerry iced tea as I wallow in the shallows of the Madison County, GA side of the Broad River.
You see, my dear pal Jim moved out to a little trailer in the woods on a ridge overlooking the river a coupla years back. This was an epic undertaking considering he had lived in the same dilapidated cabin in the woods just outside of Athens for about a decade—and Jim admittedly has a hoarding disorder. Truly one of my favorite people on the planet, Jim is a something of a Renaissance man. A metalsmith by trade, he's a master fiddler, a damn good potter, and a charm-riddled comedian who manages to know more than a just little bit about nearly any topic one might muster. For several years, Jim worked part-time for an auctioneer. Never one to say no to a free offer, he walked away from just about every gig with a pickup truck full of random crap—and I mean crap!
Most of the auctions he worked were for defunct businesses and industries, thus his house, yard, & outbuildings were scattered with rusting wire display towers, bolts of acoustic wall cover fabric, rust-encrusted tools & machinery, unwanted appliances, stacks of institutional crockery, and a bazillion bizarre objects of inexplicable purpose. Eventually his crazy old redneck landlord kicked the bucket & left the place to his meth-addled eldest son, and it wasn't long before the rest of the kin got in on the estate, gave Jim the boot and put the 14 acres up for sale just in time for the real estate market's celebrated swan dive into the toilet.
In the end Jim got the better deal, despite the fact that he lives some 30+ minutes outside of town in a tiny little trailer—his home is now riverfront property and is quite the summertime social club. Although the move coerced him into leaving much of his hoard behind, he still managed to drag more than a few treasured useless items across two counties where they stand sentinel in all their rusting & decayed glory amongst the shoulder-high weeds and towering trees of his new front yard.
In the meantime, back at the farm.... This summer has seen a deluge of cukes. For well over a month now, not a day has gone by that I've not drawn back the plate-sized leaves of my handful of marketmore plants to find at least one shiny green cucumber nearly the size of my forearm—and often it's a half-dozen, or ten, or twelve! I give them away whenever I can, toss them in ice-cold chunks into my bathwater, eat them sliced & dipped in yogurt dressing, and survive on cuke & cream cheese sammies, and gallons & gallons of cuke soup! I've also put up about two dozen jars of pickles with the intention of passing them out come Christmastime—an unlikely event considering we've already polished off three!
By the third week of June, the squash plants had gotten hit by the dreaded squash vine borers and though I managed to dig out the nasty little worms & rebury a few vines to put the tatumes back in business, I'd only gotten two little pattypans before my plants bit the dust. And it was looking like a bounteous tomato harvest until some weird bacterial wilt disease started picking my plants off one-by-one. I'm down to only a half-dozen plants and a couple of those are looking pretty miserable. I did manage to can a quart of ripe tomatoes and make a few jars of green tomato pickles out of the salvaged immature fruits—not exactly enough to sustain us if the shit were to go down anytime soon! But with summer's droughtiest, most sweltering days settled upon us, I doubt they're gonna be setting new flowers for a few weeks anyways.
This break comes just in time for our annual pilgrimage to my family's ancestral farm in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts. Our three-day journey northward commences tomorrow evening and we'll be enjoying the icy lakes, cool breezes, & nippy nights of New England for a solid week before returning south to take part in the August death throes of summer in Georgia.
