Toast to Berries

Two weeks ago when I had my "annual" physical, the woman I saw took one look at my list of complaints, and my sample daily diet, and said, with palpable hesitation, "it might be worth doing a gluten-free trial." It was as though she knew me, though our relationship was at that point only five or six minutes old. But I'm so worn down by the parade of doctors I've seen in the last year that I just nodded calmly as I said "I honestly don't know if I can do that without starving." She, in her wisdom, nodded too, but said nothing. She knew I'd heard it, and decided to leave it alone.

So on Sunday I started. And it became clear very quickly that if we had not gone strawberry picking on Saturday morning, I'd NEVER have made it through the day. I'm a toast girl. I've been living on toast for as long as I can remember. I eat everything else I'm supposed to (!) and then when I need to stop being hungry an hour later, I have toast. All day long. There's apparently a significant amount of gluten in toast.

By the end of day two, I was in a heap on the floor wailing that I couldn't eat another bite of polenta and could I please have some of the leftover sesame noodles. We decided that perhaps it was wise to go ahead and have the sesame noodles, and pick up where we left off the next morning.

I keep wondering why I think all this is worth a blog entry, and that maybe by the time I get to the next paragraph it'll become clear. It hasn't yet, so I'm going to stop, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with the strawberries. My life has become a little monotonous this past year, as I somehow get myself to keep putting a foot in front of another even though it doesn't feel like there's much waiting on the other end of the step. When we woke up at 6 on Saturday to be at the farm at 7 for picking berries, I remembered what it's like to be excited when you wake up. And then the berries kept me going for the first two days of this thing that honestly feels as though it might be impossible for me, even though I know perfectly well that it's not. That's all.

Launch

We got the plants in late this year, thanks to a very slow spring, not much luck with starting seeds, and apparently poor selection of plants from those they grew from seed at Mom's. Last year we got the morning glories in before the end of May; this year not until this past Tuesday. But it's looking good, and I'm going to try to post photos along the way this time. I forget to appreciate the deck until I remember each summer how much we really get to grow out there.

Will somebody please tell me how to use one of those photo album thingys so I don't have to keep stumbling about with photo-posting?

Friday afternoon

It's been more than two months since last I wrote, as lately I seem to have more to say about pedaling to work and back than anything else. But today I've seen a handful of my school-year kids for the last time, and the summer stretches out in front of me asking "what the heck are you going to do NOW for income?" Most days I'm overflowing with panic. Others, like today, somehow, perhaps thanks to a free and sunny Friday afternoon which seems to suggest that I've got plenty of time to figure it out, not so much. I could do anything, I think naively. I could write all summer and publish something in the fall! I could get an income-generating website going, finally. I could, for heaven's sake, advertise!

All that seems like a little much, though, and I just got an email from the local co-op folks that one of the farms is ready for pick-your-own strawberries. I'm even more excited than I might otherwise be for the picking because we've borrowed a chest freezer from mom to stow produce for the winter this year. Course, we have to keep it in the living room, and there's nowhere to put it except for in the corner where the TV sits, so we're about to have the whitest, tallest, fullest-of-produce entertainment center ever. I'm awfully grateful to have found a mate for whom such absurdities are not out of the question. I'll post photos once we get our new living room occupant settled in...