HEADFULS, HANDFULS

Planted spring beans and winter greens today, slowly learning bits more about the soil and what it must do and what the plants require it to do, and how little I knew only last year. And how little I know now. And because the knowledge we have can fill up what we think until it feels like a whole headfull, we have to keep learning that there's always plenty of room for such things as the feel of the dirt in our hands in the dusk, as the soil and the night take color from each other, our hands keeping the soil visible so we can get in the last of the beans...

And following me around all day circumstantially was the baby ferret, who didn't seem to be much bothered by my presence as long as I stood stock still at his appearance, as vassal to lord. Seemed wherever I went there he was too, rattling some dry leaves, poking his tiny masked face out of the bamboo, exploring under the deck, worming in and out of the firewood, furry butterscotch all warm and stretchy in the sun, curling back upon himself and enthralling me in the process.

Also gathered a kilo or more of air potatoes, as I call them, mukago, the viny fruit of the wild yamaimo, took me a while to infallibly recognize the yellowing leaves that are slightly off center, and their silvery vine-nodule fruits a centimeter or two in size up there in the overgrowth, but then my eyes couldn't stop spotting them, they had become as everywhere as they in fact were, and I couldn't walk down the road without having to stop and gather them, how could I just leave them hanging there, all that silvery bounty strung out for the taking with no other gatherers around, and most prolific, of all places, on the roadside right in front of our house.

There is something of the treasure in such things that are given to us direct from the hand of nature, that hint in their essence of the unbounded generosity whence we ourselves have sprung, and that we suffer to betray. And to celebrate this gift, a simple dinner of air potatoes like black pearls in a mist of rice, to satisfy the hunger they had given me.