Guess what guys! I am going to start writing journal entries again because I now have homework to procrastinate (from?)! yay!

Let's see, there are a lot of things I wanted to tell you, diary, but the fancy never struck me to write it down.

Weekend before last, Robin took us up to the apple farm for his birthday. His dad's part of a communal farm, and every year they go up and do the harvest, which falls right around Robin's birthday. It was truly wonderful. Just a lot of hot sunny labor amongst rows and rows of ripe fruit trees.

We'd lay out a couple tarps around the base of a tree, and five or six people would hold up the edges while a couple people took long hook-ended poles, hooked them onto the branches and shSHshSHshook them and the apples would come thu-thud-thud-d-d-ing down like mana from heaven. The bounty was just astonishing; I was grinning like a damn fool the whole time. I mean, you just don't understand the word 'bountiful' until you've harvested a large ripe orchard. Over the two days we were up there, we filled 18 bins--each bin almost twice the size of a pickup bed. I mean, maybe that doesn't sound like a lot of apples, but it's a LOT of apples, especially when you're carrying them to the pickup truck box by box, each box containing more apples than a large FAMILY could reasonably eat in a week.

As we circled the tree to hold up the tarps, it sometimes looked to me like we were a prayer circle. Everyone stood, heads lifted, looking up into the branches; as if in adoration, expectation, and thanks for this tree that would feed us. And maybe that's true, maybe we all were. I know I was. I recall observing as we brought our equipment down the row to the next tree. Two people in front, carrying poles jutting high up into the air; next, two people side by side, dragging the big blue tarps behind them like bridal trains; and then me, holding in front of me a box of apples. I said to myself, "Is this a procession or what?"

And after a day's work people were flushed and tired and dirty and happy and we ate mountains of food. After a few games of poker (I was the big winner that night), we retired to our camps. I set up my sleeping bag under the stars, and Oh, my god, it was like someone took double-handfuls of tiny diamonds and smeared them across the sky. None of that citified is-that-a-star-or-a-satellite. Just looking out into a galaxy of ancient light.

5:42 p.m. 2004-08-26�