Goodness of Life

A Bouquet of Potatoes

The best gifts are the ones like these: delivered this afternoon to the back doorstep by my friend and neighbor Richard. “Close your eyes and open your hands,” he said. And then he proceeded to empty his pockets, filling my cupped hands with beautiful little brown potatoes. “Organic,” he added.

The potatoes are a sort of bouquet, I think, a bouquet of humble, earthy things. I happen to be crazy about potatoes in every season, but now when the March winds blow cold off the ocean, there’s nothing better than chunking them up, tossing with a bit of olive oil and a sprinkle of dried thyme and roasting in a hot oven for 20 or 30 minutes. They’re best eaten right away out of a fat, round earthenware bowl with a dash of salt and pepper.

What could be better than this: fragrant roasted potatoes, a crackling wood fire, a glass of wine and the curtains shirred against the night. I think of the little hobbit with his armchair pulled up to the fire, smiling at the goodness of his life.

Goodness of life. Let me count the ways on this Tuesday in March. Cotton sheets flapping on the clothesline; the sun, thin at first, then taking hold by mid-day; the news from my sister that my second grandnephew, Rhys Douglas Campbell, saw that very sun for the first time at 9:20 this morning; a good work-out in the wilderness behind my house, vine yanking, raking, loping briars at their roots; the voices of four friends on the phone; reading Emily Dickinson’s “On a Columnar Self–How ample to rely…”; reworking the verse of a Story Picture; and now sitting here at Gracie, my computer, writing to you: all the friends I know and all the friends I don’t.

The goodness of this life. A bouquet of potatoes. A birth. A poem. A daunting effort to tame the wilderness. All on one seemingly ordinary Tuesday. And now, it’s time for dinner.