"oh molasses rum"
NOOOO! i just wrote a really beautiful long , amazing, terrific, crisp 747 word entry, and IT ALL GOT DELETED! AH!
well ok, i’ve taken a breath, and there must be a reason for the big delete. maybe it was too good. the internet gods didn’t want that much competition… here we go again…
plant and sing, zoe does a blog entry, take two…
it was Sylvester Manor’s second annual plant and sing extravaganza, but a first for a few of us, including myself. i would rate it as a wildly, garlicky, success. starting last friday the hordes gathered. nesting off into different locales about the manor.
i had heard it was going to be a lot smaller this year. and well on saturday morning breakfast , as we all sat elbow to elbow, some of us opting for lap seats, at our (well, what i thought was an enormous dining room table) table fit for eight, set for fifteen, i thought, oh my, this is little? it was as though our manor shrank in size, she felt amazingly cozy and nestled. i dont mean to say that its not normally cozy, because she it, but this was a more, “we need more plates!” cozy…
friday night we were all invited to a concert in our living room, where the occupant of our ladies parlor , laid out a terrific musical buffet. it was that sort of music that i didnt’t think happened in living rooms, but the kind of music that should, and the kind of music that i am really glad does. so thank you jeff.
saturday was our garlic popporama, and did we ever pop some garlic, 500 pounds of garlic. we all were able to sit outside in the amazing warm afternoon, with the sunshining romantically all around us. we broke the heads apart into the cloves, shared some songs and thoughts making it a little bit of an L L Bean moment… the sun did her best to stay out, but the wind started picking up about 300 pounds in , so we shuffled inside to our small barn and made it through the rest of the garlic. soon there after we tucked into a delicious, well deserved pot luck o rama.
i went to bed on saturday night, trying to not feel too daunted, thinking “oh my, in a matter of hours it will be time to get food organized again.” but when i woke up sunday morning, i could smell bacon and eggs and garlic and hear a breakfast already in the works, i snipped into the kitchen to see who was at the helm, and there was bennett and his lovely mother edie, wonderful annadeene, and christopher and jackie from the city, frying up the bacon, setting out the table and organizing breakfast. and i was like “oh my, i like these guests!” i figure that bennett must have some secret list of wonderful, talented, helpful, interesting guests to call in when there is a time to be had. or garlic to be planted…
we soon headed to the fields to do some honest planting and singing … all that freshly popped garlic ready to be laid in. everyone sort of managed to organize themselves into little groups of threes or fours, and engineered some system or another to plant that garlic. and by snack o’clock we had finished the first field and were near finished. the second field was beautifully layed out and the soil was so fluffy and so ready for planting. we, by then, all had some brilliant planting system and finished up that last bit by 1 o’clock on sunday afternoon. we trundled back through the bamboo forest to the manor and sat down to some outstanding leguminous soup. i actually had a little dream about that soup last night, (now that the garlic dreams have stopped…)
plant and sing was such a remarkable cohesion of so many lovely people, and such amazing food. so thank you so much to everyone who came, and put in such appreciated hand-hours, thank you all so much, for planting big garlic, little garlic, russian garlic, outrageously huge elephant garlic. for singing old songs, and teaching new songs, for playing music, for doing dishes, for setting the table, for clearing the table, for doing the dishes, for putting chocolate chips in the snack o’clock surprise, for popping, for dibbling, for stringing, for eating food, for bringing food, for enjoying food, for saying thank you, for saying please, for waking up early, for staying up late, for planting and for singing. i can say with confidence that planting the garlic would have been a lot less of a festival without everyone’s help, and well, to be honest, we would probably still be out there.
so again, thank you to everyone who could come. and for those who couldn’t, too bad so sad! no im kidding, but there is always next year.
happy friday, and happy rain.
