family saturday

we began the afternoon with a visit to the aforementioned new hot dog stand just a hop and a skip away. fashioned from a repainted VW bus, the stand sits perched between a local art gallery and a house filled with antiques for sale. we gobbled our dogs in the car with a bag of chips to share and a stack of napkins on the console. other eaters (mostly in twos) squatted on oilcloth blankets on the lawn munching their hot dog of choice. mine was minus the relish.

next it was off to Bates, our favorite nursery, to replenish our garden. while jeremy headed out in search of herbs, i cranked the a/c and jumped in the back seat to feed eli. studying the faint purple and blue road map of veins along his forehead, i found myself once again amazed that those veins were intricately formed in my womb over a matter of only months. the concept of a human life's creation, and how evident it is that only God could construct such a detailed miracle, continue to be revealed before my eyes.

we located jeremy across the nursery asking advice from a woman in a large sun hat and gardening gloves who was working in the blazing heat. eli donned his own hat, but even with that and the canopy of his stroller it was still much too scorching, so i quickly pointed my selections out for jeremy to grab and headed for some shade. eli smiled with both relief and curiosity as i held him in the air and let a refreshing watery mist blowing from a fan dot his face and legs with tiny droplets. fine wisps of baby hair (once black but growing blonder by the week) blew in the breeze and his pink cheeks felt both sticky and cool as i kissed him.


the back of our subaru was soon loaded down with a large antique-rose-hued coneflower, two blueberry bushes, a couple of small cacti, and a fragrant chamomile plant (my picks), along with some lemon verbena, apple mint, and delicate thread-like clumps of ornamental grass called pony tails, plus a bag of bone meal, and a single terracotta pot for them all to fight over.






a quick dash into the farmer's market on the way home yielded two ears of sweet corn, a large handful of tomatoes on the vine, a lemon, and scallions for a batch of fresh farmstand salsa to revive us after our afternoon in the sun.


the end.