Bumper Cars
May is coming 'round the mountain and that's about the time that we get caught in the current of our season. Though there was snow accumulation last Monday, we have been busy getting the farm engine started since early March. It reminds me of the gradual progression into adulthood, when each step along the way felt like you had the most responsibility you could manage. High school, when you were given enough work that you couldn't possibly find time to mow the lawn at home. Then onto moving out of the house when the reins are actually in your lap...then into starting a family when a few more horses were added to your team...and then maybe starting a farm which feels a bit like attempting to break a wild stallion.
Just about this time we are getting our first sunburns of the season, welcoming the sun, shedding our long sleeves and breaking our skin in the hard way...not recommended by any of the medical professionals or moms in our lives. There are baskets of violets waiting to be steeped, online order tickets stacked ready to fill, pastries coming out of the oven for delivery, trays upon trays of plants growing to their full potential for spring plant sale, and then a slow and steady waning of that time I get to look Rich in the eye.
If you look to the calendar, there are only six months until we see the steady waxing of our down time. Sometimes I need that reminder to serve as a light at the end of the tunnel. But if I look to my recent dreams, something in my reticular activating system is firing warning shots. I've woken up for the past few weeks almost daily with vivid memories of my dreams. Peppered throughout those memories were two instances of me falling asleep behind the wheel in slow traffic, playing bumper buddies with the cars in front of me. I woke up both times before experiencing the reaction of the person in the car...but with enough of a jolt of shock and guilt that the thought of pouring my morning coffee sounded overstimulating.
I'm not half as superstitious as my better half, but I these dreams to be telling. Maybe preparing me for the feeling of our high season...when our heads hit the pillow hard and when our task list could trail behind us for a few hundred yards. Or maybe it was the body's intelligence, remembering a real memory from back in my culinary school days. Every three weeks we would rotate into a new full-time 'class'. After finishing up a three-week stint of pm Cuisines of the Mediterranean...it was time for Breakfast Class, when we would wake up at 2:15 to get to class at 3 and cook the most expansive breakfast menu from scratch for the rest of the school to use their 'swipes' on. The flip and flop of schedule is one thing for a weary, 18-year-old who just moved across the country and away from home. Then there is the pressure that I, as an individual put on myself to excel in a highly competitive environment alongside middle-aged professional cooks and other ambitious young guns in the classroom. As it would turn out at about 2 pm when I was fresh out of class one day, likely smelling like the stock pot of steel cut oats I was in charge of that day, I opened my wide to see my little sky blue Prius parked on someone's rear bumper at a red light.
Spotting a Marist College sticker on the rear window of the car, I figured the opening door would produce another fledgling student looking at me sideways. Instead, it was the student's loving parents on the way to visit her at school. I'm pretty sure other than my parents', it was the best possible bumper to kiss that day. They came to assess my well-being rather than inspecting the new flair I had added to their car. Feeling the pull toward my Catholic school girl confessionals, I bared all...telling them I shouldn't have gotten in the car after class with my exhaustion and all. The light turned green and they wished me well and suggested I nap and off we both drove. Lucky, lucky me. Lucky that I was not nodding off on the highway and lucky that I bumped into such sympathetic folks.
Anyhow, that period of my life was probably the first encounter with propelling myself past full capacity and into overdrive. And it was also the chapter when I triggered autoimmunity which was there all along waiting for a moment when my body was pushed and pulled enough to blur the lines of limitation. Pushed and pulled by me of course...That's right. I'm in control of this thing. And as much as it seems the farm is an unbroken horse, I know that I don't have full control over such a vast, living system. And I must sit down in the grass regularly and watch the kids burn off steam in the yard...and allow that bucking bronco to live on in the background...accepting the items I DID check off of that trailing task list.
And there'll be no more getting behind a wheel under the influence of depletion. My REM cycle is making sure of that ;).