summer lovin'

This year, I'm loving summer so much more than ever, savoring it all the more for having enjoyed those blissful 6 weeks at home from mid-May through June to plant seeds and get the garden good and going. Now, in the hours I have before the job and after, I'm enjoying so much the brief walk-throughs morning and evening on the weekdays, picking a weed here or there, harvesting a cucumber, baby-talking the cilantro, just sprouted, still wearing its seed-case like a perky round hat on its extended little leaflets, so damn precious.  And oh, the long weekend days that afford hours at a time in the soil: bliss!

This morning it's a bit gray and drizzly, wrong weather for mid-July but I'm not minding so much since it's been hot, really hot, and the tomatoes and eggplants are well-established.  I just came in from shutting off the sprinklers on boxes 3 and 4 (which must be done manually because Someone chewed the wires, disconnecting them from the timer), and amused myself by arranging the fresh peaches from the neighbors' tree on the new plates from a yard sale this weekend.  I bought these 5 lovely little handpainted plates for a dollar apiece from a woman three streets or so over who said, as I was picking them up to put in my car,

If you Google them and find that they're worth much more, please let me know.  There's only so long a person can keep Granny's things.

I'd only even gone to this yard sale because of the signs.  I'm a total sucker for good garage sale signs. The hook is that sometimes, not always, but often enough, the signs are accurate, like the time I had to go to the garage sale advertised as EPIC, at which I found an Anthropologie skirt for $5, a skirt that fits perfectly, is darling, and probably retailed for $68.  So this past weekend, I couldn't pass up the sale advertised as multi-family, one whole block.  The detour is so much more worth the time when the sale is multi-family; even if one driveway is filled with baby clothes and toys, there is still the possibility of treasure next door.  So even though I was anxious to get home with my basket of goodies from the Garden Exchange, detour I did.

Marin is a really small world, but it still constantly surprises me.  I bought the plates at the first house I stopped at, and then walked to the next driveway, this one covered with garden stuff, so I was pretty much pig-in-shit happy, just to use an expression my father is fond of.  [Aside: some day I'll write about how my father has The Best Collection of Americanisms in his vocabulary and can tell you precisely their derivation.  This is what comes of a French childhood of idolizing cowboys and coveting pointy boots.]  At the Garden Exchange in downtown San Rafael, Juliane had told me about a woman in my neighborhood who was talking about starting an even more local exchange, so that those of us in Skabo (local name for Santa Venetia, spelling varies) wouldn't have to drive the 15 minutes to trade our surplus veggies with more distant neighbors.  I had already decided that I'd probably still drive to the bigger San Rafael exchange since I've already fallen totally in love with the people there.  How to not love a meet-up with ukelele and plum tart and charming, charming people?  I was hooked from the first meeting.

Anyway, standing there in that driveway looking at hanging baskets, I overhead the driveway's owner mention to another customer that she was thinking of starting a garden exchange.  Seriously. At which point, naturally, I had to interrupt and ask, "Wait, are you Becky?  I just heard about you at the San Rafael Garden Exchange."  To which she responded, "Wait, are you Ariane of the apricots?"  Clearly my first visit to the garden exchange, with loads of excess fruit, has become legend, transforming me into the prodigal, the amazing Ariane of the Apricots.  How crazy is that, right?  That I'd just heard about her and then at the precise moment she's talking about the garden exchange, I'm in her driveway?  Nuts.  I left her driveway with purchased baskets and some free zucchini traded for a promised jar of honey. And I actually had been wanting zucchini.

This is part of why, on Saturday, I was possessed by this strong feeling that I was quite literally Right Thing, Right Place, Right Time.

So, you may be wondering about the plates.  I regret that that neighbor didn't Google them herself. Although honestly, were I her, Google or no, I would have kept them because they're just lovely.  And that they had been Granny's would have been reason enough for me to keep them forever.  I don't have anything of my grandmothers' in my possession, except a couple of holy medals and maybe a rosary or two.  Then again, maybe this neighbor wouldn't have found what I found when Googling, since I am, in my own opinion, a bit of a search-savant, genius with the parameters and all that.  

These little plates were handpainted by a Walter Wilson, sometime probably between 1980 and 1915, and could be worth as little as $20 a plate, maybe as much as $100. Hah! How about that!?

I haven't driven back and told her so, but am planning on stopping by when I drop off Becky's honey. Who knows, but we may have more in common than just these plates now.  At the rate I'm going, in terms of everything being connected and the world being tiny, we might even be related.

Meanwhile, it's enough for me, really, to look at a pretty peach on a pretty plate.  It's really quite enough.  I am not flipping the plates for a quick profit.  I'm perfectly happy to keep them forever, fill them with edibles and tell their story, just a little more loveliness in an already lovely life.

XX

And because I can't resist, here it is, the song I can't stop singing. ;)