The Soundtrack of One Life out of 108 Billion: Entry 2: On Top of the World with Men Without Mouths (Carpenters, CBS Radio Mystery Theater)

There are a couple of deep, spring memories from Cache Valley.  The first: I stand on the bridge over Spring Creek.  The water is high, almost ready to creep over the road. It's swift, but glassy.  Black stemmed willows arch over.  They reflect, bend, break, bleed into blue sky in the creek below.

"On Top of the World" by the Carpenters plays in my head. I sing along.   I am seven, maybe eight.

A pipe runs under the road, carrying Spring Creek from one side to the other.  With the water so high, it is invisible.  A large whirlpool twists and turns, bending light, torturing the reflected world, occasionally sucking down a passing twig into the unseen.  I stand there and watch and sing.

I move on.  The creek is so high the fields are under water.  A vast shallow lake stretches east towards the Logan Mountains, great trees turned upside down in the reflection.

Everything is submerged except the lane, the house of the elderly couple we lease the ranch from, the milk barn, and the great concrete bull barn where our apartment is.

The next: I play with my race car set in the hay loft above the bulls.  It is an enormous space with two bunkhouses.  I keep my stuffed animals on a bed in one. Mice have moved into my mother tiger.

Out in the hay loft is my play area among a few scattered bales of hay: a Matchbox City carrying case, electronic car park, an electric crane, and race car set between mesas of hay.




There must be a radio too, for I've turned on the CBS Radio Mystery Theater.  Why I listen to it up here, I don't know.  We usually gather in the the living room around the new quadraphonic stereo.

I wish I hadn't.  I have never pictured men without mouths before. My mind won't let it go no matter how many times I sing the Budweiser jingle--and here's to you, the king of beers is coming through--to make it go away.

I creep down the tight spiral staircase to the saddle room, very dark below.

Lean Into the Past with Found Objects: Remants of Time Add Weight and Depth to a Garden

Cities are moving people

Who just forgot their lives.

--Cy Curnin of The Fixx

Old farm houses like this one, which I pass daily on my way to work, inform my garden.

June.  Summer time.  A smack-a-fly-dead day.  This valley is me.  This place I know deeply.  I sit in my recliner and stare out the window.  Heavy sunlight glistens off the oaks my brother and I planted 14 years ago.  I have known them since they were six inches tall.  Rye gently sways before them.  My eyes are weighted.  There is depth here.  I lean into this place and it accepts me.  We are not separate.  There was a time when many people had such a connection.  So much of humanity has vacated place.  I don't understand it.  I accept it.  I know what it is like.  I have lived in apartments and have moved when rent increased.  I know that world.  I have sat still on the expressway under an intense sun staring at a glass box office building waiting for the traffic to move.  But it has never been me.  Here is where I have always been--this great western valley with less than two people per square mile.

One of the Oaks Lloyd and I planted 17 years ago viewed through a wine glass that sits in the window.

I think it is important something of our past remains.  Perhaps, we can't all be farmers.  Perhaps we can't all sit on ninety acres and listen to cicadas sing while looking at the world through the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps for most of us, home will be temporary, but we can garden whatever lot or balcony we have intensely, personally, hands stained black by soil.  And we can bring in remnants of time, symbols of a past that wasn't plastic--a rusted wheelbarrow, an old iron bolt, a weathered shingle, a broken cinder block--ghostly messages from a world that wasn't digital.

To me, it seems vital.

An old hay rake that was on the property when my parents purchased it.

A vignette that I set up in the old pig shed.

A recycled mushroom bed from a local mushroom farm that I set on it's side to form a wall.

I built this hanging bucket garden to tie in with the pig shed, the last standing farm building.

Below are some a couple of YouTube videos with great ideas for bringing the past into your garden.

And finally here are a couple of great videos by the Fixx on the collapse of farming communities and man's isolation from the soil.