““Can I get you some food?” she said. And as a matter of fact, I’d left home without eating breakfast, and had no lunch. Sometimes there are just too many things to do, and making food is not an option. “You can say ‘yes’, maybe you should use this as a practice round” Nikki said. She smiled and tipped her head, as if to say “You idiot” in the nicest, most gentle way possible. The offer of food made by our client, and friend, the third person in the garden, whose house it was, hung in the air. We still had probably thirty plants to put in the ground, and I felt like pushing ahead, but in another world, it was, indeed, lunch hour. “I can make you an egg,” she said. I almost blushed. The whole idea of being treated with the utmost consideration, put me into a panic. An egg, I thought, and felt some shame for having not brought my own food. But an egg sure sounded good. Just a basic egg. A pod of protein, warm with salt and pepper, on a moody, hot and cold work day. “I might have some bread,” she continued. Now I was really stuck in a bind. Her enticements were weakening my resolve, to tough it out. It was my fault I had not planned far enough ahead, nor had enough time, to bring my own sandwich. It was not her fault. “That egg has your name on it,” said Nikki, and I could feel her winking at me, making things worse. Sometimes co-workers know you all too well. “Thank you, that would be nice,” I finally stammered. The earth did not move to swallow me up, although I feared as much. It felt suddenly, like an evolved thing, to allow another woman my own age, to feed me, without throwing a fit. Reflecting on it now, my many years of feeding a family, or families, every night, decade upon decade, has made me this way. It felt so good, to put meals on the table, and it assured me, of my utility to the group. What now? Have i become a useless, bottom feeder? In reality, I am still the CEO of my own multi-national corporation, if only in the abstract. Awash in plants with names like Pixie Meadowbrite, Violet Pinwheels, and Golden Sphere, my world is ... well ... wasn’t it Joni Mitchell who said in her lyric: I live in a box of paints? I left the job, at the end of the day, and headed north, to buy cat food. I was completely out of cans, and for that matter, out of gas. I made it to the convenience store, in Hinesburg, just in time. We’ll be putting a lot of miles on the truck, next week. I swear my appointment to get the studded snow tires off was on Memorial Day, but when I got to the shop, it was closed. These are the trials & tribulations of the average person, working for themselves. I can hardly take a day off. But in the same breath I say this, I can’t wait to work on our job by the lake. I have ideas, and plants, and poetry, to put into the restoration before us. We don’t work by the lake much, and damnit if we don’t feel the sweetness of what having a lake-side camp might feel like. This is our closest brush with the lap-lap, of summer leisure, which someday, we might enjoy ourselves.”
