Tuesday Evening Update

I'm up to my neck in workwork, so I'll just post that there are two families genuinely interested in the Blue Truck and both would give it a good home. So that's hopeful.

I jotted down this bit earlier today:

Paper Lantern
This tender shoot is bowed double,
both ends buried under the dirt
in which its seed is buried.
Tomorrow one end will have broken free
reaching for the light strung up just inches above it.

This isn’t real summer.
This is a false summer of heating mats
and grow lights and green house plastic
to hold in the humidity.

36 plugs of dirt and this is the first shoot,
the first glowing green rising
just 2 mm above the soil,
but under the lights I couldn’t miss it.

One glimpse and the whole summer stretches before me.
I can suddenly see heavily burdened tomato plants
and wild climbing beans, butterfly bushes,
squash plants run wild, watermelons creeping toward the house.

I feel bent double myself under the weight of a car payment
and work deadlines and a kitchen that never gets clean,
but I see that tender shoot and smile.
She will be free of the dirt and I will be free of the debt.
She’s a Paper Lantern--a 5 out of 5 on the hot pepper scale.
She may be bent double, vulnerable today,
but come September she’ll make one hot taco.