daily bliss: serendipity

Shortly after I posted about my day of über-interiority, my friend J called to see if I wanted to come work in the garden and eat dinner with her and T. I changed into my old jeans and shoes, grabbed a bandanna to keep bugs out of my hair, and headed out into the now sunny, blue sky early evening.

Tonight's task was transplanting baby lettuces out of a big patch of greens into rows where they can breathe, grow, and form delicate heads. We worked for a good hour and a half before heading indoors with a huge bowl of fresh lettuces and--brace yourselves--arugula--for a delicious salad. J's sister and her young daughter stopped by, and we all enjoyed a fabulous feast of huge green salads, crusty bread, cheese, wine (Layer Cake Shiraz, so lush and jammy I want some at my house now!), Italian salami, soup, spinach with bacon dressing, and yogurt with canned plums. Almost everything we ate was food that T and J made, or their friends had grown/raised/made, including the meats.

Which I tasted.

And, oh, oh, oh, were they good (i could veer off into analogies here, but tonight, it's enough to say they were *good*). The salami. Mmmm. The little lardons of bacon that T smoked himself, from a friend's pig, mmm.

I told him that come summertime, when tomatoes are ripe, I want a completely homemade BLT. And I will eat it. And I will love it.

Will I still call myself a vegetarian?!?

My brother L calls me a "vegetarian who eats bacon."

The evening was just the antidote to all the interiority of my writing projects and the last few rainy days that left me stuck inside. Between the splendid food and fellowship, and the honest work of tending to baby plants, well, it was a swell evening. They sent me home with a tub of yogurt, a bunch of paperwhite narcissus, and a drawing that V. made, which I've tacked to my refrigerator. Inspiration.