A Day’s Work
From the looks of things, it’s going to be the Year of Apples and Mulberries. I lost count at fifty mulberry trees last year (the rabbits of the arboreal world) and have already cleared a patch in the freezer for the jam and barbeque sauce we’ll make in a few months. The trees that give us apples are a mystery in variety and origin, remnants of a working orchard that rimmed the meadow where the former residents’ dairy cattle grazed their afternoons away. The fruit is an impressionistic red streaked with lime-ish green and face-puckering sour. We have yet to turn them into anything beyond a quick trail snack, tossing the cores onto the walking path for the deer if they want them. Everywhere we look is food in raw form and if we didn’t have day jobs, we could easily make a life of gathering, preparing and storing the land’s bounty to get us through the seasons. It’s time to get out the “Edible Wild Plants” book and dog ear the “Spring” section. For as long as we live, there will always be work to do.
If one of life’s prominent themes is motion, another must be contrast. We wouldn’t appreciate warmth so much if we didn’t know what cold fingers and toes felt like toward the end of a winter walk. Silence is that much more blessedly soothing when it follows the cacophony of the neighbors’ 4-wheeler slicing through the air on a summer Sunday morning. Sweet plays with salty in a dark chocolate almond bar where flakes of sea salt land on the tip of the tongue in that first bite. I’m not thirty anymore (or forty, or fifty…shall I keep going?) and I know it, as evidenced by how much less weeding I can do in an afternoon without noticing any aches in my fingers or knees. Tending to the land spreads out over several days now. When did gathering fallen branches become a full day’s work instead of the warm-up for the after lunch gardening marathons of my youth? Hundreds of thousands of people with whom we share this planet work much harder than I do, no matter what my aching knees say. It’s all relative and I get it, but it’s good for the soul to consider another’s life work, the rhythm and rocks that a fellow human must move in order to survive, to solve a problem, to eat.
For the past thirteen days, first responders, engineers, tugboat and barge captains, transportation officials in Maryland and workers at the Royal Farms convenience store near the entrance of the Francis Scott Key bridge have put their shoulders and hearts to the work each of them must do in the aftermath of a disaster that left empty chairs at six families’ tables. How do they awaken each morning since March 26, knowing—or not knowing—what will be asked of them in the day’s waking hours, and how do they put it aside, if such a thing were even possible, when they finally reach their own driveways and dinner tables? In the days following the September 11 attacks, it was someone’s job to figure out where to transport the debris from the Twin Towers so that it could be sifted, examined, sorted and piled up, one truckload after another, day after day, week upon week. Who bore that burden and finally decided, in a moment of karmic irony, that the Fresh Kills site on Staten Island, the world’s largest open-air dump, would be the most suitable place for such a heavy and unfathomable purpose? Twenty-three years and 600,000 tons of debris later, there are still fragments of lives amid the dust, no closure within reach. No matter what I was tasked with during my time at the American Red Cross in the days and months following that horrific event—receiving volunteer interest phone calls by the dozens, directing a steady stream of blood donors at our doors and guiding community businesses wanting to feed us as we worked ‘round the clock—none of it came close to the weight on the shoulders of that one person who directed the truck traffic at that Staten Island dump-turned-graveyard and crime scene.
Getting up at 4:30a.m. twice a week to catch a bus downtown and support those who advocate for nursing home residents isn’t easy but it’s manageable compared to the hard labor required to harvest sugarcane in India, coffee beans in the mountains of Central America, or direct air traffic in a tower high above the runways of the world’s airports. I have little to nothing to complain about given my circumstance and privilege and I’m aware of that, deeply, for the majority of my waking hours. We all do our part, with a grounded commitment to the outcome, and that mustn’t be minimized or overlooked. It’s just hard not to compare my day’s efforts to someone else’s, a someone whose home has a dirt floor and sheets for windows. Looking globally to my left and right, I humbly acknowledge that I work on easy street and pretty much always have, every day of my employed life.
Let the mulberries fall in showers from the trees. I am up for the job of sorting and washing them, picking off the stems and crushing them into their next life as sauce and jam and who knows what else so that we can enjoy them in the chilly days of winter.
In Baltimore, there are three more bodies to find beneath the wreckage and a bridge to rebuild.
