Solstices

I realized the other day that I always feel overwhelmed at the solstices - at the winter solstice mainly because everything looks brown and dead, and the lack of life, the dryness, the dark and the cold. 

The summer solstice is exactly opposite.  It's hellishly hot - our version of deep winter - and the weeds are over my head.  Life abounds in plenty to the point of oppression.  In the long days you would think you could get a lot done....and surely you could if it were 75F.  But it is not.  The humidity weighs terribly, and undone work cries out everywhere, becoming swallowed in the ungrazed grass.  You try to work on it and end up bathed in sweat, your head aching from the heat and the sunshine, your movements like someone underwater.  You hardly do anything, and yet you end up exhausted.

The fifteen cherry tomato plants are bursting with fruit, not unlike the flood of milk and the crush of eggs.  They are harder to pick than the big tomatoes, of which I hardly got any around the army worms - it was a bad year for them and I didn't have the time to pick them off every day.  These little tomatoes are sweeter, more flavorful, more vigorous and productive than the big tomatoes.  The challenge is keeping up with them.  They are dripping off the vines by the hundreds, and they must be picked, in the spirit of thriftiness and to honor the season of plenty.