The Work of Edie Clark

Red Is the Color

Last year was one of the worst years for hay that I can remember. Aside from the need for sunny days to dry the hay before baling, these fields are wet anyway, so if it rains too much, the fields are too wet to bear the weight of a tractor. So the farmers wait and wait for that longed-for stretch of hot, dry weather. Here, we waited all through July – the wettest July on record, according to some reports – and into August before it seemed possible to cut and dry and bale. Even now the memory of that time is left in the fields in ruts so deep, the words of the tractor are written in the earth clear enough to be read beneath the snow.

A bad year for the garden, as well. For the past several years, I’ve belonged to a CSA, short for “community supported agriculture.” The concept is simple: community members purchase a share of the farm and in return receive a bushel of produce. Such a thing is left on my porch each week, the vegetables fresh from the garden. Everybody wins. The basket provides a serving or two of peas or tomatoes or squash, each in succession as they come in throughout the summer. This also answers the call to buy local, which is sensible in every way I can think of. The produce is from the same earth we till here and it has not been shipped thousands of miles to reach my table and forced to ripen along the way. And the person who grew it is a friend who is trying to earn a living as a farmer. I think that person should be supported. Nothing against the farmers in Chile but I like the idea of eating the fruits of her labors instead. Supporting local agriculture is a simple idea, perhaps even self-evident, yet it has become a movement, an agenda that stirs passions among the committed, inspires bumper stickers and banners.

Even aside from what I get from the CSA, I still plant a garden, rows of tomatoes, basil, parsley, summer squash, cucumbers, the things I need more of than what comes to me in the basket. I love to can tomatoes, for instance, for use throughout the winter. The year before last, I had such an abundance of ripe tomatoes, I was able to put up 30 quarts plus plenty more for salads and slicing. These tomatoes, in particular, were unusually beautiful, perfect red red orbs, no blemishes or cracks or worms. Some even seemed heart-shaped. In fact, they were so gorgeous, so catalog-perfect, I posed them for pictures, wicker baskets full of happy fruit. I even had a bumper crop of green tomatoes, their season cut short by frost. Wrapped in newspaper and stored in the basement, these went in unripe and came out weeks later, red and juicy. That’s what I call the end of a good year.

But then came last year, rain and cold, the tall hay standing in the field, blown over and flattened by each nasty storm. It was all a sorry sight. In my garden, the tomatoes hung sullen from the vine. (Puppy Harriet was no help. She picked them off the vines as fast as I could turn my back.)

Our summer ended with few ripened fruits, certainly nothing like the abundance of the year before. We shivered through many a July and August day, a fact that made some of us a bit cranky. The produce from the weekly basket wasn’t much better than what I got from the garden here, that is to say, disappointing. I did no canning. In another time, even 100 years ago, we would have been facing a hungry winter. No matter how technologically sophisticated our world becomes, no matter how global, we still have to rely on the earth beneath us, the unpaved, still-fertile soil to provide, just as Benjamin Mason did when he first worked the soil here in 1763. I’m sure his first crops were meager. But each year must have strengthened the harvest. If that were not so, I would not be here now surrounded by open fields that still bear crops, fields that Mason and his sons opened by clearing virgin forest with axes. It all would have been forsaken by the successive farmers and long ago it all would have grown back to woods. But it’s all still here and the hay still grows tall and the tomatoes blossom and bear fruit the color of anger, the color of passion, the color of love.