Quality of Life vs More, Part 3

David Crossley, May 14, 07.

Life can just be so good sometimes, as it is for me at this moment. I'm sitting next to a big window looking onto our backyard jungle where the sun is coming through the trees in rays and hitting the orange fish in the little pond just so, and they swim out of it and back into it.

We just made - and then ate - a huge frittata, with some exotic zucchini from Edna, some little golden onions, garlic, and tomatoes. Glass of wine with it, at three on a sunny Sunday afternoon, can't beat it.

Sitting in this big, bright room eating the frittata, with some fresh sliced tomatoes and some toasted olive bread, both from the Bayou City Farmers Market, we talked about painting the main wall pale apricot, and the ceiling pale blue.

This morning we worked hard in the garden for four hours, pruning a big tree and dealing with the remains, fiddling with the giant tomato plants to keep them from smothering each other, clearing out hundreds of past-their-prime nasturtiums (and collecting pounds of seeds for friends and next year), planting some new flowers, and feeding bunches of marble-sized grapes through the wire frame of the new arbor, which is an astonishingly nice addition created by the artist Mike Scranton.

Both the tomatoes and the grapevines had entangled themselves with the Meyer Lemon tree, which is heavy and drooping with 167 golf-ball-sized still-green lemons that will get to be baseball size and be incredibly delicious in the summer. We had to put a big net over the peach tree, because the peaches are now turning fiery orange and the birds are beginning to eye them. The new pear looks like it's fine, and the new grapefruit tree, which is only four feet tall, has about 20 little grapefruit on it.

The Mexican thorn lime has just a few tiny little fruit, but all of a sudden it's burst into flower again, so maybe we'll get some limes for the first time. The Capital orange and the Clementine tangerine sadly don't seem to flower, and thus haven't produced any fruit.

Green beans are coming every night, zucchinis and cucumbers just now have little vegetable objects on them. Fried a few zucchini blossoms last night, along with some enormous Gulf shrimp. Ate the last of our spring potatoes Monday.

To be sure, life is not perfect. One of the two main longitudinal members of the wheelbarrow cracked in half, and that will be a lot of trouble to fix. Some years ago, when I had a fabulous woodshop, I would have just gone out and made a new piece for it. Although I would have made it out of oak, which would have been much better than the pine that was used originally, making the wheelbarrow basically disposable, which is pretty much the standard in the current world of More. (Those two words, Better and More, do such a great job of explaining themselves.)

Lacking a shop, here's how I'll make the piece. Actually, two new pieces. Might as well. Buy a piece of oak 2x4, get my friend David Gresham to rip it in half for me, to make two 2x2s, and then sit in the backyard in the evening with a glass of wine and a drawknife and shape the handles, and then some Sunday when I'm forced to because I need the damn wheelbarrow, I'll take it apart and put the new wood in.

Tomorrow I'll go back to work at the office and immediately get engaged in the stressful activities of modern life. But because of today, I'll be a little more calm, and a little more mindful of how un-serious all that is, and by tomorrow evening I'll be back in this life for a few hours. We're going to celebrate Mother's Day tomorrow evening with our sons and daughter-in-law, as well as celebrate her birthday. We'll certainly have some green beans, tomatoes, and greens, not to mention some great new potatoes grown by our neighbors at their place out in Edna. Just thinking about that, I'm enjoying it already.

My judgment of my state of wellbeing is pretty high most Sundays. That's when I think and write about quality of life, and I have to say I'm pretty happy on those days, here in our little garden paradise on 5,000 square feet of land in Montrose, in Houston, Texas, in mid-May at the gradual close of an eight-month-long set of wonderful seasons as the slow summer sets in.

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