When I was in the 7th grade (that was 1970, a full 50 years ago), my teacher made us write a daily journal. She took them home on the weekends and read them and made comments, with little smiley faces in the margins and lots of exclamation points. When I reconstruct her in my mind, I realize that she might have been in her late 20s or possibly early 30s. I particularly remember the task of keeping a journal when our family went on its annual trip, driving down to Mexico that year. Sometimes it was hard to think of anything to say when we just spent the day lying in the back of the bus, on the big mattress, barely paying attention to what was going past us. But Kathy Diehr loved that journal and enjoyed the vicarious life of traveling with our family. She wasn't the first to encourage my reporting habit, but she was certainly one of the most enthusiastic.
With that beginning, I kept a journal religiously until about 1990 when a life with two little kids just took over -- and the world of word processing arrived. Writing in a book by hand gradually became too time consuming. Now I write a lot of letters and notes and sporadic blog entries, but I have no regular journal habit.
So, with that introduction, I am going to post a journal entry from this weekend. Just a typical November weekend with no drama.
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Got to the stand at 5:45 and turned on the lights. Olivia arrived right away and took Carrie's usual place in the cooler -- I stood at the door and read from the clipboard while she unstacked the crates, creating each market load. 1 collard, 1 cabbage, 1 ginger, 1 turmeric, 4 lettuce, 1 Cherriette... By 6:20 all three trucks had rolled out and I loaded my van with the CSA boxes that were stacked in the coolbot and then shopped for the Leesburg market. It was already warmer than I expected and it was barely dawn.
When I got to Leesburg, Susi and Tara were in a little bit of disarray. Susi was substituting for Jess who has just finished being a positive covid patient and she had never driven the truck to that market and didn't know where the parking spot was. She had unloaded about twenty feet away from our spot and when I got there they were schlepping their stuff up to our fancy real estate (we are at the top of the market). The market felt really weird to me. Where was everybody? The parking lot was practically empty. Turns out this was the first week of winter market and it starts at 9:00 now. Whoops. Susi was filled with relief to have an extra hour to set up.
I went to Loudoun to deliver the CSA boxes. Ciara met me there and helped me unload everything. Then we loaded up Attila's stuff and the Takoma Park vegetables and just as I was ready to go, Kathy came with more eggs. On the way home, I stopped at Mom's in Leesburg and picked up more lettuce and bok choy, packed in bread trays and wrapped with plastic. So heavy and hard to move. As I was leaving Leesburg, Sarita called. We sometimes manage to connect on Saturday mornings when she is on the way to her farmers market and I am on the way back from my rounds. It's nice.
Mom was washing and bagging for Sunday markets when I got back. I decided not to unload my van until Jon could help me and I got on my golf cart to go pick some more for Takoma Park. Fields are full of gorgeous choy and kale and mustards. I was picking lettuce mix when my phone binged "Hallelujah hallelujah hallelujah!" Biden won PA! What a relief. I felt like I was missing all the noise that must be happening somewhere. There must be horns blowing and people singing somewhere. For sure people were crying, after such a week of learning that half our country still wants more of this horrible president.
Jon came back from Sassafras Creek Farm with a little load of beautiful carrots and Jerusalem artichokes and we unloaded the vans together. There was the van with 85 crates from Sunnyside plus my load plus his load. We tussled over the cooler management and how to unload -- for some reason we just couldn't get into any kind of sync and we just yelled at each other over stupid stuff but eventually we got it down. He loaded the carts and I rolled them into the cooler and unloaded them. I'm the one who needs to know where everything is, in the end. Unloading trucks is hard work for these old bodies which probably contributes to our crankiness.
Then the trucks started coming back from markets, with triumphant crews and not much to unload. We fit all the greens leftovers onto one cart. That's pretty good.
2:00 Zoom call with a small portion of the Newcomb family. Jude is the star attraction. That family has been holed up in their apartment in Manhattan for months and months, never seeing anyone. I can't quite imagine it but they are managing fine with that little 1 1/2 year old cruising around trashing everything (and also putting things in the trash). It is very nice to see Sarah N every week, up in her own little hidey hole. She is not allowed to see anyone either. Ugh.
Can't remember the rest of the day. I spaded Hoop House Two so we can start planting for winter. Oh, I decided to pick a little more spinach for the Sunday markets at about 4:00 and sent Carrie a text telling her to tell Zoey I was doing that. Zoey came RUNNING out at top speed. She has been feeling the burden of being the oldest in a house with a newborn. Then a few minutes later Carrie and Olivia came out on the golf cart -- Olivia was in a dark and sad mood, having been awakened from a long nap, but after about half an hour she came back to her usual runningaround self. We all went down to the stand together and Carrie and I washed and bagged the spinach while the girls did their stand routines, writing on the whiteboard, eating apples, stomping in puddles, running in and out of the CSA room. Those little girls are craving normalcy but they are doing just fine. The moms are getting very little sleep but the baby is only barely two weeks old by now. Things will get better.
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Turned on the lights at the stand at 5:45 as Ciara rolled in. We unloaded and loaded veg and she left at 6:15. It took me a full half hour to pull together the TP load, but it was a good one. I made sure they didn't have anything suboptimal. Unusual amount of diversity for the last market of the week. Went back up the hill for a hot yukky.
CSA prep was easy because we had so much food in the coolers. Susan and Robert and Mom and I worked without hurrying, bagging carrots and lettuce and bok choy, setting up a glorious display. It was a hot and sunny November day.
Practiced some of our choir pieces with Yael who has skills.
1:00 Zoom call with the Friday Club that has been meeting on Sundays for a few years now. We reveled in the election results. I made chicken soup while we talked.
Yael and I went out to pick the last vegetables that we needed for Anna's birthday dinner. She had requested a dinner that included every vegetable that was at the market on Saturday. We picked some broccoli (Yael had never seen it growing in the field and was amazed to find that the head grew in the middle of a big green plant. It's fun to be there when people learn stuff like that.) and four tiny cauliflower heads because this was a special occasion and a few kale leaves and a couple of bok choy.
Jon didn't like the original idea of eating in the greenhouse (we were going to practice for a covid-avoiding Thanksgiving dinner). He didn't see the point. He said let's eat around a fire. So he set up picnic tables and lights and a fire pit in Mom's front yard and we practiced for an outdoor Thanksgiving. Might be raining and freezing, but we will cross that bridge later.
The lights were so bright that it didn't seem like night at all. The pyros in our family were happy. We had a big green salad (lettuce, arugula, mustards, carrots, garlic in the dressing) by Jon and Yael, cole slaw (cabbage, ginger) by Mom, roasted vegetables (rutabaga, potatoes, radishes, sweet potatoes, carrots) by Gordon, chicken soup (Moutoux chicken, kale, collards, carrots, forgot to put the turmeric in) by me, roasted broccoli and cauliflower by Yael, steamed choi and tatsoi and Choi Sum by Jon, bread by Gordon. We ate almost all of it. Rebecca had been wrestling with a dessert all day, failing in her efforts to make the cake for tiramisu so she made oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (gluten free for Gordon) instead and everyone was happy. Shaia spent many cheerful minutes putting ponytails in everyone's hair, including Michael L's and doing ballet poses with Yael. At my request, Michael did a reprise of his walking chant that he performed at the Shadow Cabaret (We are all made of 'shrooms. We are all made of mushrooms... goes on about centuries of tradition and about being a song that will never end and ends with many repetitions of "I cured my depression cause I LOVE MYSELF"), which we all recognized as being much inspired by his Grandma Mel.
We finally opened up the Winter CSA to new folks, and I watched the numbers go up until I just needed to go to bed. I knew it wouldn't fill up after 10:30 at night.
When I was a teenager, I signed every journal entry "Love, Hana" because I always felt that I should sign off.
Love, Hana
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