Under Brian's Rock

I grew up a stranger in a stranger’s land.  It was the America of the 60’s and 70’s and it was Texas, and I started life there with so many strikes against me.

I couldn’t speak English until I was five or so, I can’t remember, but I was always conscious that my parents were from someplace other and starting off in a vernacular that is not only foreign to one’s environment, but also inimacable to it, defined the rest of my life.  To this day, I still speak a language no one quite understands.

The short story, then the long one.

My parents were from Brazil.  In Texas this made no difference back then, I was a wetback and that was it.  That my family was educated, cosmopolitan and accomplished counted for little.  That they worked hard to send me to the best schools made no difference.  I was tainted.

But I never minded that really.  I was seen as different and that was what I instinctively knew I was anyway, and it didn’t matter what my schoolmates thought, I reveled in the difference and promoted it.  I am not of you, I said, didn’t say to them, I am something other, something you cannot, or will not understand.  I am Camus’ Stranger and his Plague, because you fear me on so many levels, and you probably haven’t read Camus anyway and so have no idea what I’m talking about.  I was such an insufferable treat back then.

But as I was something other then, there was something more.  The clues to my something other were there from an early age, something I didn’t understand, but that melded into the vernacular of being outside.  I never fit into anyone’s idiom, and this was only an extension of that.  I have written before of my awareness that I was attracted to men from an early age, but this was something that, as I grew with time and a Catholic education, and that in Texas, I learned to hide as something far more sinister than being the child of wetbacks, however ignorantly misconceived.  Being someone other from the beginning only gave me more tools to hide.  But one’s sexuality is a viscerally difficult thing to hide, more so than an accent or a birth certificate.  By my adolescence, I had left the ethnicity behind and found myself vilified for something other.

None of this matters now, except that I found myself at lunch today with a colleague who is Canadian.  He’s a great pal and was instrumental in helping me find the job that may keep me in Brussels.  He’s also a great fan of my gardening columns and we share a passion for gardening and a love for the Northwest of England.  I enjoy this man.  We often talk politics and society, Ralph and I, and his Canadian perspective is valuable.  He gives me the view of a Canadian on America, which is basically, chill, guys, what is the big hairy deal?  He knows I’m gay, and that is as much an issue as his voting rights being married to an American.  Er, not related.  When Canada integrated gays into the military, the initial reaction was the breakdown off military discipline until someone said, what is the big hairy deal?  When Canada allowed gay marriages, the initial reaction was the breakdown of society until someone said, what is the big hairy deal?  And Canada just got on with it. 

But as we were having lunch today, and talking about all this, there was a chap queuing up to pay for his tray and I said to Ralph that I thought this guy was a bit of all-right, he was good looking and had a great arse.  Ralph got a bit squeamish at this and then I said:

“Look, mate.  All those years of growing up with locker room conversations where I had nothing to add, because they were talking about things that I had nothing to say, and now…”

“And now you’re making up for lost time, Brian.”, he said, laughing.

“Yes!!”, I said, and I knew he understood. 

I know what it is to grow up in a society where your vernacular has no translator.  I know what it is to live in a world that has no cues for who you are, where they mitigate against who you are, and to strive for an identity in a world that denies you a tick in a box its imagination has no room for.  I understand this on so many levels that few are favoured with access to.

I remember a few years ago writing a response on someone else’s blog about a question someone had asked them about their HIV status, on the assumption that they were gay and so must be HIV+.  I can’t find that posting now, but what I think I said then went something like this:

I am a man, and a father of two wonderful boys, and a gifted writer; I am an excellent cook, a good gardener, a loved son and a good brother.  I am gay and I am a polyglot, and addicted to cryptic crosswords.  I have been a talented actor and a successful theatre director.  I have been a great teacher, and a poor one.  I can’t read maps, I am inherently lazy and so have an instinct of how to make things run efficiently.  I pick at my toenails when reading a good book, and am in unending search of the perfect fried chicken recipe.  My roots are in Brazil and Maine, Switzerland and Hamburg, Dallas and Baltimore, London and Brussels, and I left part of my heart in East Africa.  All these and none of these define who I am.

So I will make up for the lost time in ogling that security guard, or checking out the guy in the line at the cafeteria, and I am grateful to Ralph that, even though it made him uncomfortable, he understood what it is to look in through another window. 

Cheers, Ralph.   

 The day that my grandmother died, I looked up into the doe eyes of a giraffe, and I heard a lion roar.  And the sound of that chills me still, all these years later.  It is often said that once Africa is in your soul, it never leaves, and is yours for life.  Karen Blixen understood this, and so does my editor, Judy Miller. So Judy, as thanks for all your encouragement and friendship, here is a piece of my soul that we share.  Kwaheri!

Normally of an evening I like to sit out in the garden with a glass of something and the crossword, the windows open to a jazz radio station I enjoy, and my goofy dog chasing his favourite ball back and forth and barking at the goats.  The bird feeder is as crowded as a truck-stop with beautiful green finches that bully even the pigeons to scrape fallen seeds on the ground.  It is my favourite time of the day, what my mother used to call ‘goat-time’, but that is a story from another time and on a different island.  I have the goats, but not the frangipani and hibiscus blossoms of that summer, but as I stood in the kitchen doorway this evening watching the rain come down, memory took a detour and I smiled to remember another island and another garden, this one in Southeast Asia.  This garden had no goats, but it had hibiscus bushes, orchids and humming birds, but best of all, at the end of our lawn, we had a swamp.

Then, as now, we’d sit out after work with a cold glass of something, leaving the air-conditioning to the sit in the evening breeze.  Beyond the lawn, the swamp was lush with reeds and water lilies and further still, there stood the forest that lined a distant river.  At dusk, which falls with a certainty only found in the tropics, monkeys would howl and screech, chasing one another in the trees and if we were lucky, monitor lizards, some two metres long, would haul themselves out of the water to monitor the lawn below us, perhaps waiting for the neighbour’s cat to make a careless pass.  Occasionally our Chinese landlord would let his gardener come with a sharpened machete to chase after these beasts which, I was told, made for an excellent meal.  Thankfully my companion at the time was an excellent Italian cook, and monitor lizard does not taste like chicken.

But when the rains came, hard and thunderous, any willing friends that were around would don a huge old t-shirt kept for the purpose, a chair would be placed in the grass, and they were given the sublime treat of having their hair washed in the rain.  The rain came down like a warm water shower and a bucket was kept at hand in case it let up, but there is nothing so wonderfully refreshing as having ones hair washed in a rainstorm and that, followed by a gin and tonic, a meal we all cooked together and an evening of cards, made for a perfect Saturday by the South China Sea.

Over the years that followed, many of us left the tropics, promised as you do to keep in touch, meant it, and then didn’t.  Changes in life led some of us down roads we never expected and for some of us, our hair-washing days are gone for good anyway.  But for the time of our time, in that garden by the swamp, we treasured the food, the love and each other, knowing perhaps that it could never last, and so was prized in its impermanence. 

Until it’s celebrated again years later, in a kitchen doorway leading to a garden under the rains of Flanders.

I am not normally a political animal and find no home in any particular ideology.  Over the years I have found that political maturity is a process of evolution and what was true for me once, is not true for me now.  I hope that I have now come to the point of realising minds can be changed and opinions can give way to new ways of thinking, and to just enjoy politics for the gladiatorial freak show that it is meant to be.

But I have always been nervous and suspicious of overt nationalism and its ugly stepsister, jingoism.  Samuel Johnson once described patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, but I would argue that by the time the scoundrel has taken shelter at that bus stop, the bandwagon of unthinking jingoism is pulling up for him to jump on, and anyone who doesn’t run after the flapping tailcoats is held as a traitor .  This was exactly the thinking behind the passing of the so-called Patriot Act by the U.S. Congress in 2001.  This egregious document was stuffed with provisions that tampered with or gutted many of the provisions and ideals that characterised my father’s America, leaving him bewildered that it could be so casually tossed aside into a bush of poison thorns.

I had none of this in mind when I wrote Say My Name in the autumn of 2006, at least not entirely.  What moved me to write was the lists carved into the cold stone of the Menin Gate of the tens of thousands who were never found and the cost paid to the incompetence of those who prosecuted their deaths.  I tied it into the Iraq war as naturally as the Great War was tied to the Second World War and the Cold War.  In a knot of vipers, every snake has its fangs firmly in the tail of the one that came before.

My editor at the embassy newsletter where I write a regular column on the subject of gardening liked it so much, he ran it as a front page feature a few weeks ago.  Careful not to disturb sensibilities, he added a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the opinions therein were those of the author and not of the publication or its parent company, a department of the U.S. government.  I had no argument with this from the simple premise that I wrote the thing, of course the opinions were mine.  I recognise that care had to be taken as this was an in-house publication of the embassy in a major European capital.  A small price to pay for having your by-line above the fold, particularly as this paper was read world-wide, in no small part because of my regular contributions to it.

The backlash was almost immediate, and a chilling reminder of what America has abandoned in the name of “patriotism”.

The piece was published in a weekly publication in Brussels on Friday morning, the 25^th of April.  That day there was a party at the home of one of my dearest friends and mentors.  Carie always threw a party for all her staff, scores of us, every spring as a thank you and this was her swan song.  She was soon to leave for Baghdad and her loss to all of us was keen, not least to me as she was my champion not only for work, but for my family in a very difficult time.  As it happens, she spent her swan song trouble-shooting the ridiculousness that often accompanies U.S. government service.

My piece had touched a chord with a secretary at NATO, part of our bailiwick.  She rang my editor that morning, who reported that,

‘She objected to:

"Walking through the exhibition, I was reminded of another, more present war, but one equally mismanaged, overseen with spectacular incompetence, with no reason or goal, to which young men and women are sent because they feel they owe a duty to their country. Theirs is also a price paid to the stupidity of others, in a war no one wanted, that was fomented by arrogance, ridiculousness, and a moral inertia that was allowed to run away with itself.”

Bells rang immediately and the PC network kicked in.  It seems this solitary objector went to the highest authority at the U.S. Mission to NATO who then rang through to the hostess of the party demanding that the piece be pulled. 

I don’t blame Carie, but feel bad that her farewell was clouded by such silliness and cowardice on the part of the nabobs at U.S. NATO.  I don’t blame the complainant, though I would have preferred she had had the courage to address the author of the piece, which she failed to do.  There was nothing I expressed in the piece that has not been published in every newspaper in America for the past five years, and even then, my disclaimed opinions were expressed obtusely.  Though it has been reported to me since that this woman’s husband was felled by a heart attack in Iraq, he is among the named, and he is among those who were sent home to be received, cherished and buried.  Say My Name was written for those who weren’t, in another war.

As a writer, I am happy to address disagreement, and I hope that, if what I write invites dissent that those objecting to my words will tell me so and we can then have constructive engagement on the issue.  I love a good argument, preferably after a good dinner that I cooked and a bottle or two of wine that lubricates the discourse.  That didn’t happen here.  Better had they taken me to task over what I had written, something they had objected to.  Instead they enfeebled the argument by going straight to the top, the first port of call of the unimaginative, and playing the patriot card.

Say My Name was to be published the next week, with the offending paragraph censored.  I asked that it be withdrawn entirely, and my editors agreed.  Others followed suit:

Brian,
I salute you and your standards!

The guys in the mail room said "this was the first time a newsletter has been revoked".

Can I just say... DAMN! Who wrote that? and can I tell them "YEAH!" and give them an imaginary/internet high-five?

I can't say "no problem" about your decision, but we all salute you.

I thought you should be aware of the rumblings in case there is more to come.  I think this is a beautiful story that is a poignant memorial to all those who have served and sacrificed. It is a sad reminder of the pain and loss of life that effect families of any war conflict, regardless of which side you are on.  However it is easy to see how this could be a taken otherwise by someone who I understand has lost a spouse in the current war and is understandably sensitive.  I hope that with another reading will take it for the honorable memorial that I’m sure it was meant to be.

Dude, You rock! And I think you know why…

Patriots ask the difficult questions and say what the authorities don’t want to hear.  Your friend is a patriot…it reminds me of Wilfred Owen, ‘ Dulce et Decorum est…’

Others argued the issue over dinner parties and one friend found himself in a reception next to the complainant, itching to take her to task, but lacked an appropriate moment.

Gelert argued most eloquently on the subject in his blog, for which I am grateful, and gave me the forum my government denied.

But, perhaps you’re not really blooded as a writer until you’ve been censored by your own government.

But that is not only what disappoints me.  What disappoints me is that the U.S. government so easily caved in to one person’s objection, and demanded that my piece be pulled from an inconsequential newsletter. 

Never mind First Amendment issues, I’ve been cautioned before that they come secondary to the face one has to put on working for Uncle Sam.  But to be censored by the U.S. government on the complaint of one person is more than deeply disappointing.  .

I realise this is a tempest in a teacup in the grand scheme of things.  But to me and many others it brings into relief the sad depths this country has sunk to in the name of “patriotism.”

My father would be so deeply disillusioned.

My father had only a small terrace garden in his two-up, two-down, but it was bright and sunny and he had managed a small garden with everything in pots, including those of my mother’s roses he was able to bring with him when he sold the house.  These had lived in pots for many years including one, I think that had been on her grave, but I no longer remember.  I brought his roses home with me last summer, intending to put them in the ground but time and emotional inertia left them to winter over on my terrace, cold and root bound.

But with last Sunday’s warmth and sunshine it was time to clean up the garden for spring and with the help of my boys and a basic lesson in geometry, I dug a diamond-shaped rose bed in the middle of the lawn.  Diamond is perhaps too elegant a word for as my astute twelve-year old pointed out, it was more of a rhombus, but that was fine; I have always been diametrically opposed to symmetry. 

My garden flat is the downstairs of what had once been a farmhouse, and the soil of the garden, though underlain with the local clay, is rich and dark and easily workable.  It is riddled with large healthy worms and the things I plant seem pleased to be there and flourish.  Nevertheless, I dug a large quantity of compost and manure (fumier séché de vache) into the soil and added rose food to the soil packed around the roses.  As they had been pot-bound for so long, they had been deprived of nutrients and so were spindly, with rickety branches and little leaf growth.  As with people, fresh starts and transplanted environments are tricky times, and care and encouragement is needed to put down roots in a new home.  Care should be taken in keeping the root ball intact and leaving some of the original soil attached to the roots so that it feels a little at home in a new neighbourhood. 

Mine is not a broad sweep of lawn and it ends in an overgrown leylandii hedge that blocks much of the sun, but the new bed seems to have enlarged the garden, giving it depth and perspective and when the roses bloom this summer, I hope that it serves to extend the view, a trompe l’oeil of hope winking at limitation.  Small spaces are only as girded as imagination allows, and my little rose bed serves to broaden the view from my window.

But more so, I was pleased that my sons had helped to dig a new home for their grandparents’ roses, and as long as the roses live, my boys will have a stake in the soil and in the family.  Alongside these heirlooms, I planted my own Blue Moon rose, a favourite of my mother, and a blowsy, show-off rose called “Samba”, a nod to my parents’ childhood. 

It is easy to feel smug and self-gratified in a garden and it is healthy to realize that the natural world will cock you a snook at the first opportunity.  The next morning I woke to find that the neighbours’ cat had dug a hole in the soil and used my rose bed as a latrine.  Mother would have laughed, and been pleased.

Sam and Alice accepted me into their family without hesitation and without reservation, and such love is rare.  My wife had been a childhood playmate of their daughter, Adele, almost thirty years of history and affection was mine by default. I never felt I truly deserved this, but theirs was a nature that held that family extended far beyond the bounds of biology, and they had the hearts and the open arms to accommodate as many as came to their home and sat at their table. 

I shared in their history, just as the countless exchange students they hosted over the years did, and when their own children spent their own time in foreign lands, so too were those families drawn to the front porch with an open door in a leafy suburb of Baltimore.  They immediately understood my chaotic parentage and when I offered to make them the Brasilian national dish of feijoada, they jumped at it, they had been there before, an exchange student had brought them to it.

Sam played trumpet voluntaries at our wedding, I served a formal table with Keith, another exchange student/adopted son at their 35^th

wedding anniversary dinner, they shared the joy of the birth of our children, and one of my abiding memories of Sam will be the motley group of extended friends, family and children that caroled the street at Christmas-tide, Sam playing carols on his trumpet as we stopped at each house with a light in the window.  My own children took to calling him Grandpa Sam, and when my elder son took up the trumpet, and asked one summer to play Sam’s, he beamed with pride and joy. 

Sam’s memory began to fade in recent years, slowly at first, but this disease is as relentless as a glacier.  The family has worked to keep him active and vital, and that has helped, but I, who am a sporadic visitor, need to remind him who I am.  And so, one spring, in a garden now long gone, I planted forget-me-nots for Sam.  I told Alice, because I knew she would be pleased.  And she was. I have since given up that garden and have begun another.  And with the passing of my father and the loss of another beloved garden, the forget-me-nots were left behind.  But unlike memory, forget-me-nots are sturdy and spread, and one evening last weekend, lamenting the weeds I needed the time to tackle,  I noticed among them the familiar blue and pink of forget-me-nots that had somehow crept their way among the tulips.  I thought of Sam, and was grateful.

Because unlike memory, gardens revive, year after year.  My garden has always been a haven of memory of people I have loved and have gone and in that it is alive with them.  It renews itself and at the same time grows in the tracks of what came before. 

But that is what gardens should be: an inviting haven for those you love.        

Like Sam and Alice’s front porch.

I posted this a month or so ago on a night dark with regret and poisoned by loss.  I removed it the next morning because a cold winter’s dawn forced a sober glare on raw feelings and left me open and bleeding.  I hate that about myself and, slow as I am, it took a month or more to realise that to deny when you are raw and bleeding is to deny something as basic to yourself as joy. 

I have changed the music because the first one posted was about hurt and defiance.  This one is simply the truth.  There is no resolution to this and acceptance of that is the start of healing.

Here it is, baby.  ag cara beunydd.

You think I don’t think of you.  You think me neglectful and uncaring.  And I can’t do anything about that because that’s all you and little to do with me.  You pull that out of your own bag of tricks, we all have them.  

But you’d be right that I don’t think of you.  I’ve come to the point after over four years that only every other thought is of you, and I guess that’s some kind of progress.  I don’t fill the coffee machine at night thinking of you but I do wonder if I’m grinding the coffee beans to your taste.  I don’t get dressed in the morning thinking of you, but I do wonder sometimes what you’d think of this sweater with that shirt.  I don’t think of you as I’m cleaning my teeth, but wonder if you’d think kissing me as I’m out the door with fresh minty breath with baking soda is to your taste.

I don’t think of you as I’m driving to work, but for that song that comes on the radio, that maybe was one you like that you sent to me, or some tragic, slit-your-throat lyric that reminds me of us.  No worries there, mate, even the happy songs remind me of us, because I see you in the seat next to me rockin’ and rollin’.  I only think of you as I pass that last large billboard into the Kortenbergh Tunnel, advertising an exhibition at the Museé de Bozar that we’d both love, but that’s gone in 10 seconds.

I don’t think of you when I laugh out loud at work; I only think of you when I realize that you won’t be there at the end of the day to share it with.  I don’t think of you as I wonder what to make for dinner at night because I’m still trying to cook for one, without thinking how to make this so you would like it and we could share it.  

I don’t think of you with all the changes I have to make in my life right now, because you won’t be there to share them, or bounce them off, or see them come to fruition.  Because, I guess, you really have to be there.

I don’t think about you when I crawl into bed at night, because I can turn on the telly to distract me and I have the dog to stop burrowing under the covers to sleep on your side of the bed.  I don’t think about you last thing before I go to sleep, because you haunt my dreams anyway.

I only think of you when people ask about you, which is becoming rarer, because they know how painful it is for me.  So that’s only once or twice a day.  I only think of you when I come home and close the door and here it echo, and love the dog without sharing him with you.  If he could speak, he’d ask about you, because I spend more time trying to find you than I do with him.  Then I realize he’s here and he’s flesh and blood and needs my love and attention so we go for a walk and I spend it having imaginary conversations with you.

Maybe that’s why I got the dog: his slavish devotion to me will never replace you.  My slavish devotion to you will never get you into my arms. 

So no, I don’t think about you.

There was a recent story in the Dallas press about a Baptist Church in Texas publishing their directory.  This church is welcoming of gay members and their families in spite of the objections of some of their members, which is to be expected, these are Texas Baptists, aren’t they?  The usual practice of including photographs in the directory of families was dropped because these same members objected to gay families being depicted in the same publication as their own families, the implication obviously being that gay couples with children aren’t really families and don’t reflect Jesus’ family values.  They forget that Jesus never married, lived with his mother till he was thirty and hung out with sailors, but I digress.  The point is that their objection to gays as sharing heteronormative values (ghastly expression, but I borrowed it) was not to be suffered.

So the church deacon and its pastor came up with a compromise.  Group photos were allowed in the directory, even individual photos, but no family photos.  Of anyone.

Now compromises are messy things.  They involve someone giving up something so they can have something else and are never a solution because no one is satisfied and no one gets to be right.  But that’s the point of compromises; they aren’t about what is right but about what you can live with and the deacon and pastor in this scenario have the thankless task of trying to find a solution that adheres to their interpretation of Christ’s teaching of inclusivity of all his children while serving the politics of running a church.  No mean feat.

I have a great deal of heartburn with any argument that throws the baby out with the bathwater and what I find difficult to digest concerning the gay and lesbian approach to people of faith is that all religion is wrong and does much damage to human dignity and countermands the teachings of Christ and that people of faith cherry-pick the Bible or other texts to support their bigotry.  People do that, to be sure, but that is exactly my objection.  It is not enough to object to bigotry, a fair cause, but to blame bigotry on religion and faith is like blaming a bad dinner in a restaurant on the food, rather than the chef who prepared it.  I quote my entire post on the matter here:

This is Texas, what did you expect?  Obviously the deacon and the pastor are between a rock and a hard place and they did their best to find an accomodation that would suit the needs of the congregation.  That's their job, and hats off to 'em.  The teachings of Christ notwithstanding, running a church can be just as political as any other human organisation and to work out such a compromise in Southern Baptist Texas is commendable.  Is it right, maybe not, but compromises aren't about right, they're about what you can live with.  

The comment above is correct in that churches are for sinners, even those who think they are saints.  To condemn them for cherry-picking the bible is, well, cherry-picking the bible because Leviticus and Romans say what they do.  No one expects the bible thumpers to stone an adulteress to prove their authenticity, any more than throwing the whole book out because of Leviticus and Romans makes any sense.

Right or wrong is not the question, and condemning the church and Christians in general is not an answer because their hatred of gays has nothing at all to do with religion or faith, faith is merely a camouflage for a more visceral reaction.  It's like saying, "the Bible supports my stand on gays" except the Bible also has something to say about that bacon sandwich and wool/cotton blends.  They'll reject the latter and adhere to the former, so I contend it isn't about faith or religion.  

Which is why I think attacking religion is to miss the point and is the wrong tactic.  Sure people do rotten things in the name of religion, but they would do rotten things anyway, religion isn't in it.  The Bible (and the Koran, and the Torah, and the Sutras) has a great deal of wisdom but it's only as reliable as the last person who read it.

Humans are flawed, and the deacon and the pastor in Fort Worth know this and I think are dealing with it the best way they know how and trying to do the right thing. T'aint easy.  They have my prayers.

Organised religion certainly has a lot to answer for and even the Vatican, under the direction of Pope Ratz-Arse, is making feeble attempts to recognise this.  

But in the end, you can’t blame the chef because people choose to eat the menu.

It begins before spring, when farmers’ fields stir from their fallow sleep.  You don’t notice it in the cold, but only when the days begin to warm, and windows are tentatively left open to the promise of balmier days.  It wafts in and spreads, sweetening the air and singing of renewal and fertility.  The beasts that inhabit the invisible world of the soil welcome its arrival.  It awakens them, nurtures them, and they rise to meet the imperative of spreading its richness.

From the dales of Yorkshire, to Somerset and Kent, from the Pas de Calais through Flanders, the Rhineland, and the steppes of the Volga, it covers a continent and perfumes the air and farms and gardens everywhere welcome it as the kiss of botanical life.

Manure.

I have always slept with the window open and I can remember as a young man the first morning when the sweet pungency of manure crept in through my morning dreams, and I would awaken with the hope of longer, warmer days to come and the prospect of the world coming back to life after the death of winter.  Manure is the smell of hope and of life renewing itself.  It brings thoughts of rosebuds in May and the lazy hum of insects in my mother’s fruit trees, pregnant with blossom.  It foretells of long bicycle rides in the lanes through the farms with the spikes of summer wheat waltzing in a June breeze.  It prepares the garden canvas for the colours of cosmos and marigold and brings visions of snapdragons and the firebrands of lupine dancing into my head.  It presages the taste of sweet corn in September and summer squash and apples and pears.  It is the first taste of the juicy explosion of a vine-ripened tomato and the robustness of the first pumpkin of October.

My neighbour and I often walk our dogs together in the lanes and byways bordering the local farms.  This last Saturday, she was bemoaning the smell of manure, and wrinkling her nose.  Her husband had commented wisely that this was a part of country life, and unbeknownst to her, the dogs were friskier, there was a spring in her step, and she was full of her plans for an unknown future.  This is what manure does; it creates a future.