83 ~ Homer with Jay: a gift for you

Dear readers, Jay Leeming is a sublime, gifted poet, and an absolutely brilliant storyteller, from Ithaca, NY (http://www.jayleeming.com/). To give you a taste of his writing and his big, mischievous heart, I’ll put a couple of my fave Leeming poems below.

It is my delight to let you know that for the next eight weeks, live by Zoom every Wednesday at 2:30 - 3:30 pm Central Time, for free (but I’m sure he wouldn’t refuse goodwill donation if so moved, see http://www.jayleeming.com/podcast.html), Jay will be telling (not reading - telling) the full story of the Odyssey – Homer’s classic story of Greek hero Odysseus’s long journey home from the Trojan War (home to the Greek island of Ithaca, of all places…). Here’s the link if you’d like to come and sit by Jay’s storytelling fire: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86512558750 (you can also email Jay and ask him to put you on his weekly ‘Odyssey reminders list’: leemingjay@gmail.com). 

In fact, Jay is now three weeks into the telling, but thus far we’re still at some of the backstory (Odysseus is only now about to start his epic journey).  You can dive in now without missing much of a beat. This is one of the best free/goodwill gigs I know. The sessions thus far have been fantastic  – Jay is so good at this.  Anyway, a gift from me (and Jay) to you, to help us through our own journeys of winter. 

If you’re in Wisconsin or the upper Midwest, , and we get the next bit of winter wild as forecast this Wednesday, this would be a great place to curl up and get cozy.

What does the telling of a classic story have to do with the topic of these posts - food and living with the land?  Quite a bit, I’ll venture. Broadly, story is central to all of our lives – each one of us in fact lives every moment inside a story, the story we each tell ourselves about the nature of the world and the meaning of our lives.  Narrowing it further, I find richness and connection in knowing the story of my food – where it comes from, how it came into being, who gave me the seeds I grow and who planted the seeds’ ancestors before me. 

  My dear brother Tom, a fantastic artist (painter), once commented that my vegetable gardens were my canvas. With gratitude I saw he was right.  From another perspective (i.e., another story), my gardens are also a large storybook, each planting a passage or a chapter in the story. After so many years now on this patch of land, I could walk you through my gardens like Jay taking us through the Odyssey, telling you who gave me seeds for that, or about the Amish farmer who grew those starter plants, or the long struggles (and sometime successes) to get this to grow here, and which kindly neighbor will help me turn the coming harvest of that plant into meals for the freezer, later to nourish my loved ones. The story of my garden is an ongoing one, unfolding differently every year, just as the Odyssey has never been told exactly the same way twice.

Last Wednesday I listened to Jay’s telling while sitting in front of the fireplace on a cold afternoon, shelling beans from my 2022 harvest. As Jay split open the story, to reveal its possible meanings for us, I split open the dry shells of the beans, to reveal their possibilities to also nurture my life. Jay’s Odyssey is now a bit in those beans, deepening their story and what I will remember when I cook some, and plant others in the ground again in spring.

Think about diving in on Wednesday - I think you’ll be glad you did.

Next sign of spring!

In my last post, I reported that the nuns had laid their first egg of 2023. And yesterday, I tapped the first maple trees. 

Late Saturday afternoon, I’d been in the backyard pruning the apple trees, and as I walked back to the house I passed under one of the large maples, and a drip dinged on my head - like a tap on the shoulder.  It was sap, dripping from a small crack high in the tree.  And so yesterday morning I answered the prod, and got the first taps in, and was rewarded with a strong drip, drip, drip of sap. The season is on! (speaking of, a reminder that I’ll host an afternoon workshop on making maple syrup on Saturday, March 11; more information here).

Here are the promised gems from Jay’s first collection, Dynamite on a China Plate:

I Pick Up a Hitchhiker
 
After a few miles, he tells me
that my car has no engine.
I pull over, and we both get out
and look under the hood.
He’s right.
We don’t say anything more about it
all the way to California.

Supermarket Historians

All historians should be supermarket cashiers.
Imagine what we’d learn;
“Your total comes to $10.66,
and that’s the year the Norman’s invaded Britain”
or, “that’ll be $18.61, the year
the Civil War began.”
 
Now all my receipts are beaches
where six-year-olds find bullets in the sand.
My tomatoes add up to Hiroshima,
and if I’d bought one more carton of milk
the cashier would be discussing the Battle of the Bulge
and not the Peloponnesian War.
                       
But I’m tired of buying soup cans
full of burning villages,
tired of hearing the shouts of Marines
storming beaches in the bread aisle.
I want to live in a house
carved into a seed
inside a watermelon,
to look up at the red sky
as shopping carts roll through the aisles
like distant thunder.