With Hands Out of the Way, the Mind Was Free to Wander

I managed to arrive in time to get in on the last of the okra harvest for the morning.  It was my second volunteer morning at Turtle Farm, and Ben and Angela were already closing in on the end of the last row by the time I arrived at 8 a.m.  There is more to come, to be sure -- okra, it turns out, is prolific -- but the nubs we left on the woody stalks will have to wait for another day.  At the end of the morning there were more raspberries to seek out and pluck off, though the rainy summer has not been kind to the bushes.

My major assignment for the morning, however, was garlic.  "German Extra Hardy garlic" to be exact, one of the stiff neck varieties.  Dug earlier in the summer, bundled and hung in the barn to dry, it was time to snip the stalks, trim the whiskery roots, and clean away the outer papers.  And, of course, cull the rotted and unappealing.  After my private tutorial, Ben and Angela and freshly arrived John headed off to a different part of the farm to pick summer squash.  The farming neophyte, I remained behind, back of the shed with my scissors, clippers, stacked bunches and collecting bins. 

The breeze was cool, the morning was quiet, the task was pleasantly manageable for a farmer's assistant equipped with my limited skill set, and there was something pleasantly meditative about the repetitive snipping and shedding.  After awhile, the hands continue the steps by rote, leaving the mind...the spirit...to wander in any of a zillion directions -- at times analytically dissecting an issue; occasionally simply brooding enigmatically around and over an idea; sometimes simply lost in the morning's reverie.  The process of thumbing away the dirty outer papers of the garlic kinesthetically mirrored in my hands the analogical work underway in my mind.

A part of the allium family -- whose siblings include onions, shallots, leeks and scallions -- garlic, as even in the most inattentive culinarian knows, is an intensely fragrant bulb segmented into cloves, whose fingertip residue is want to persist even through repeated scrubbings.  Which, if you happen to like garlic, isn't all bad.  The scent can be an inviting reminder of recipes carefully flavored, company lovingly fed, or in my case, farm labor affectionately contributed...

...and a mind loosed to wander without rein.