Sunday

I left the hill this afternoon to pick up my food for the dinners this week.

I had played phone tag with Mike all week about the bunnies, but we managed to finally connect and were to meet at the farm at 4.

I met Geo in town earlier and picked up the lamb for the Birria, and had a late afternoon time set to pick up the squashes from Kelle and James.

When I called them, I knew that they had to finally put down their beloved dog Betsy

yesterday and it felt awkward and trivial to ask them about squash but when I called James was gracious and welcoming and having been there myself, in fact Kelle and I shared siblings of two different litters over this past 20 something years, which I suppose binds us as even more than family. Her beautiful Betsy is the same age as my Rosie, and this hits close to home on many levels. I arrive there, and they are hanging with family and friends and the grief is palpable, but they are so loving and warm and James brings me these crazy beautiful squashes, again to say that these folks create beauty and love and music within all the rich bounty and challenge that life is.

I leave there to meet Mike to pick up the bunnies that his son Kyle introduced me to last week. When we met, the sky was beginning to shift, wind picking up and the creek was much cooler and shrouded in shade by the bare alders and willows along Shit creek and Mill Street was alive with guys hanging out by their trucks as the swoosh on chill of a winter squall formed.

Mike’s partner Karen Ann had just left this morning for Hawaii to sit at her mother’s bedside, where she was finally letting go after a long bout with cancer. Mike pulls out two large bags of perfectly dressed bunnies for me and we weigh them out in his office as the stories of Karen Ann’s mother, Betsy’s passing, the very present and stark awareness, was perhaps compelled by winter, the green pasture with the Muscovy ducks eating bugs, the goats silent in their pen, the trickle and swoosh of the creek nearby, the crick crack of Alders in a symphonic collision with the wind and the distant sea swell.

Today, my church, my Sunday, before my Monday, the constant beauty and tenderness of life, of sustenance, how fragile it all is, how precious we all are.

This life.