Ryegrass Dog

           Ryegrass Dog is not a hog. She likes to share. Share in the wealth of her love and abounding spirit. Though at times she oversteps her boundaries, she always, almost always, often, corrects herself by following  command, without pouting or denying her wrong-doing. Sometimes.    

            Sometimes her square , pitbull mug resembles an alien. At times, her walnut eyes speak unfathomable volumes of compassion. Always, Ryegrass Dog likes to share, except for with Chevre the dog, her white, wolfish, one-year old boyfriend, when he tries to lick the avocado peel that she’d been working on, and she wants to murder him with her white gritted teeth.

            Regrass Dog is one of my role models. Even though she doesn’t have hands, and even though she can’t speak, and even though she doesn’t get to sit at the table, or make adult choices, or eat good steak, she makes the best out of every moment. Just look at the way she holds her chest, so high, mighty and proud. 

            A few weeks ago I let Rye out of prison. Her ankle injury was hard on the mend, and she was condemned to trailer-lounging all day long. For two whole weeks! When I let her out, one afternoon, she was the same Ryegrass . . .

           

            The moon is in full bloom tonight. Almost full bloom. The clouds are like black curtains floating between us. The moon, in big fat shiny bloom, like a chalky white baloon.

           

            . . . And Ryegrass got ahead of herself that evening. She squirmed through an ancient barbed wire fence into the neighbors land. (Kids will be kids.) Though in dog years she’s almost 35! And how she’s maintained that figure!

            Anyways. From within the neighbor’s woodwork, she barked ferociously. And then, spontaneous as a thunder clap, she leapt through the fence, like a stallion with breath on fire, back into the farm. She dashed down the hill, throwing herself onto the ground, rolling, quivering, shaking her white belly at the sunset, snorting and sneezing and snorting. But how stinky! Skunked! She got hit! The duchess got skunked! Teary-eyed but resolute, she took it like a champ, a lady, a princess. She never complained, cursed her destiny, or accused god of unjustly persecuting her . . .

            The barn toinght is like a darn. A darn of wool. Wool that was woven into a sweater in 1927. And then worn. Day in and day out. Heat of the summer and ice of the winter. Cow dung, spotted cows, and tornados. A darn like a barn. Darn it. This barn its . . .  its  got something undeniablly beautiful and real. If I weren’t myself, I would say this barn possessed an oddly mystical quality . . . something about the grains of wood, and the slats in the walls, and the  support beams like dry bones of past gods, and the gray kitten triplets, and the way the wind moves through it all like breath through a harmonica.

            But I am me, and I would not say that. Did I already say it?  The weird thing to say? ‘Whoops’ said the flea, ‘there’s a horse on me.’

            . . . Ryegrass chose not to accompany to the barn this evening. She and I worked fourteen whole hours today!!! And while the moon is full, and I am full of chatter, Ryegrass Dog is making the more responsible decision, readying her body for tomorrow’s hardship anew, snuggling on top the comforter.

            I shall now follow suit. (After gaping at the she-moon , for just another sweet couple of  life-asserting moments. Hmmmmm. And  a woooooooooooooooooooo,  cries the coyote inside the skinny marrow of my legs.

            Snuggle time with Ryegrass Dog! Good night!

Teddy     

Lindsey Morris Carpenter # 1

            Lindsey Morris Carpenter is stubborn. She keeps her dreams in her hands.

            It’s rainy. Oh the buckets of rain, the buckets of rain.

            I’m not working today. Had a little picnic. A handful of us, friends and family. We ate inside the brand new pole barn. The sheet metal roof screamed with the sheets of rain. It was abeautiful picnic.

            But Lindsey wouldn’t come in. She was stewing in the buckets of rain, hashing it out with the limp-necked tractor whose engine had gone caput. Earlier, she had been mowing thistle in a valley. For those of you not familiar, thistle’s a spiteful dinosaur of a plant. It grows ten feet, and pierces even cowhide. It’s purple flowers (budding they look like a dog’s penis) spread its seeds like conquistadores across the prairie.

            Pesto pasta, chicken, frittata, Italian bread, wine, beer, tomato fresh mozzarella salad, carrot cake. Lindsey wasn’t coming in. She breathed her life into the wounded tractor, and subsisted on half an avocado and a piece of bread.  

            A faded blue Ford tractor. Cute as a button with a grimace and twenty three horse power. Turned out, some stray barbed wire managed to curl around the tractor’s mowing blades, seizing the mower, the Ford, the thistle initiative, and Lindsey’s mood.

            Curse the stars, and stink up the heavens. Lindsey keeps her dreams, plowing, seized, broken, fixing, inside the buckets of rain, and in shovels of sun the same, always in her hands, muddy, greasy, tired, thirsty, and content. Lindsey Morris Carpenter is stubborn.
       

           

           

The Big City and the Farm

       The big city is difficult. Chicago. A few blocks West, underslung teenage boys lord over the summertime nighttime streets. Cops roar around with sirens and billy clubs. A few blocks East, the streets ooze with college-grads. They’re like me, looking for something real, but more self-conscious, affected, apathetic, and snootier than me. (Ha ha. Ha ha ha.) The big city is cynical.
       Some people swim down the streets, hurdling past bad glances like misplaced chairs in their own livingrooms. Others choke on air. They carry the weight of the magical sinking concrete carpet in their impotent hearts, knowing they could never save the place enough. They couldn’t even get to a decent grocery store on bike. The big city is scary. Someone’s always taking something from someone else, (in the decayed heart of the ghetto, and on the frilly bankroll edges of the Mayor’s paw print) even if they don’t mean to. You’ve got to pick your fistful of spaces and let peace be with you.
       (To be happy, same as everywhere, you got to be tough. To have a love that reaches unseen. To be a tree. A tower. A forest. A skyline. A bird. An airplane. To be real, whatever that means, to get it, real heart beating real blood up through your real throat, into your true thoughts.)

       There’s no sounds tonight on the farm. It’s forty degrees and misty. Today, I planted eight grape vines, three apple trees, and three cherry trees. I rammed a seventeen-pound rod into the Earth, repeatedly. Breaking up the soil, crushing the rocks. After Lindsey, and perhaps the spirit of the Grandmother tree on the Eastern hill, my shoulders are the biggest on the farm.
       After work, I walked the perimeter of the farm. I went through a marshy patch. Green and wet. A bluebird flew up from my knees. A tuft of purple flowers wagged along a fence-line.

       Why sweat over the Earth if its going to get eaten up by the sun, anyways? Why sweat over a lover?

       A New York city taxi-cab unionist baths in a flood of parking tickets, and obsesses over the white man in the mirror, moving in across the African street. Carrots grow plump and orange in the deep black Wisconsin soil. Flea beetles plot against the arugula, and hungry deer wet-dream over crisp rows of lettuce.

Number 1

Eaters of Grassroots Produce and other Kind People:

            Hello. My name is Teddy Marino. Some call me Ted. Some call me dirt. You can call me anything but late for dinner. I’ll be here all summer folks.

            Aside from Lindsey the Farmer (Lindsey Morris Carpenter), I am Grassroots Farm’s first official farmhand. A historic moment if ever.

            Lindsey’s mom, Gail, is the official keeper of books, and Lady of the nascent apple orchard. Sometimes she also feels like a mother-in-law. I wonder what she’s wondering: Who is this young man? Is he good enough for my daughter’s farm? Is he really committed? Is he just along for a tractor ride? Of course, only time will tell.

               Back in August ’09, I had just begun a job with an educational non-profit on the Southside of Chicago. The whole business was strange, disorganized, and chaotic. I am strange, disorganized, and chaotic. And I was hired to manage people. A match made in purgatory. Nonetheless, bread on the table, clipless pedals on my bicycle.

            My first week as Lead Learning Facilitator, during a training session, I asked one of my co-worker friends (whom I had known before coming to the job) for advice.

            “You really want the truth?” he asked.

            “Yes, of course,” I said.

            “Get out,” he said. His eyes are blue and his skin is pale. “Get out as soon as you have the chance.”

            Seven months later (right about now) I have the chance.
            My introduction to Grassroots Farm took place last September. Lindsey hired me to work a few of the Andersonville Farmer’s Markets. I worked the late afternoon shift.

            The tomatoes were beautiful. They were gigantic. Mythic. Paleolithic. Contemporary. Shee-shee. Hearty. Wild. Miraculous. Juicy. Sweet. Full. Plump. Exotic. Homey. Fantastic. Viney red like the blood in your heart. 

            Exchanging these tomatoes for dollars brought a deep thrill to me, it rung a chord with the primal capitalist inside: I give you, you want . . . you give me, I want. The beauty was the simplicity. And the beauty was the freedom from some of our world’s most common poisons – worker-exploitation, land abuse, self-abuse, animal abuse. Poison. It was a clean and sweet feeling to sell these tomatoes. And the buyers felt like they were glad to be there, at the least.  

            I forgot to mention: Potatoes! Beets! Orange flash summer squash! Basil!  Eeeerrrr looooom tomatoes!

            What would it be like to sweat for these things? To sweat for the food? Such a romantic notion! Why not move to a farm, get hitched, work the land, make babies? So far it’s good without the hitch, or the babies.

            And what about the apocalypse? If the apocalypse comes and Cermak Produce, Trader Joe’s, and the rest of our industrialized society collapses beneath our feet, yet the sun still shines and rain still falls, shouldn’t I know how to eat? This is not a smart reason to be a farmhand. But . . . I was wheel hoe-ing the garlic today (I forgot to mention garlic, oh yes: Garlic!) my shoulders were tiring and a single sweat droplet fell from my nose, and the wheel hoe and the apocalypse became tangled together like a garden hose and a wad of rusty barbed wire.

            Bombs. Earthquakes. Children bleeding out their shoulder sockets. Steel chimneys and black clouds. The amazon to pasture . . . countryside to suburbs . . . mountains to mines . . . anhydrous ammonia . . . soil of no worms, Earth of no life, hills hairried with  feedcorn, cows munching in puddle of feces, a sideshow freak ground up into a hamburger patty. Happy lunchtime. The apocalypse is always happening.

            Me and the wheel hoe, and the garlic, in the afternoon: a pair of hands in the grand chorus of fists that rise against the sun, the mammoth, behemoth, pulsing, inching old glacier of greed, and antiquated habits.

            If Lindsey Morris Carpenter, my friend/boss/role model, were in this business for the money, she’d be stupid. She’s not stupid. She’s hungry like an artist. Organically farm-fed, yet always hungry. These tomatoes are undebatedably inspired, and desirable.  The art of the hands and knees, tractor and soil; the sweat of the love. Achoo. God bless you.

             I’m working this season through and through. Makes me feel like a man. I mean, a hu-man. A hu-myn. A farmer! Damn, it feels good to be a farmhand! Sickle-slicing away the thistle. My appetite is strong! ‘Till soon, eat good!

Teddy