A jar full

Bo of the Bales readers,
Conjure with me an image of a farm ... farms are often pastoral-reflective even if you live within street signs and errant car alarms and roaring subways. Imagine a farm nestled, like a chirping chick, in swath-bolts of green. In green which roars with fertility after a humid spring. Imagine daisies in a field, naturalized jonquils, rosibud flora gone wild due to a supposed conservationist error, summer Queen Anne's lace waving in a breeze, bold purple-fisted field thistles. Imagine a little country woman, petite, strong-legged, bowing to her grandmother's memory who once also planted, reaped, molded her life to the land's rhythms. A woman who, undoubtedly, felt a desire for meaning amidst the green, the field flowers, and the bales of hay. A desire exacberated by a diabetes disease which eventually took her sight. A desire passed on to her grand-daughter (the little woman above) and great-grand-daughter (me) and to whomever else encounters the spirit of the farm which rests in the acknowledgement/confrontation with the seasons where ever they (you) are located, where ever they (you) interact with the what-comes-next in the cycle. I like to imagine the farm as my epi-center of the search because it's where my greatgrandfather settled back in the 1800's. When I visit my parents there, my little mother and big bluegrass-playing father, I search constantly for traces of what is, was and what comes next in my life. Do you have such a place? Do you even understand what I'm talking about? Perhaps I'm being vague and dreamy. I just returned, you know, from a visit, and it was good. I learned Vietta's, my greatgrandmother), trade ... canning over a hot stove. My first! I canned green pepper jelly; the entire old home, her original still intact within modern additions, smelled like the garden, like pepper spice. She would've been happy, her long brunette hair swept up, her nice eyes smiling. I often envy ancestral worship because it's so easy to make "your people" legendary, an ego-extension, if you don't know their skeletons, their issues. Yet, why not embrace that too? Why keep those hidden away when they speak of what we experience as humans? I wish that she had kept a journal, a blog ...
Anyway, now I'm back, inspired, in my large town, in my cul-de-sac, with Kerr jars of jelly. I've already given five away, along with sacks of tomatoes, to other bound-within-town seekers. And with the gift, I'm able to give a scent of a farm nestled in green ... a part of Vietta's heritage ... an older type of community which relied upon seasonal longings for sustenance ... a natural search for natural signficance to life's question. All of that in one jar! Perhaps I should've called this blog "a jar full" ... a subtitle, I reckon.
Bo of the Bales, though, is more fun and doesn't involve hot cooking, boiling, which is what it is despite idealized ancestral spirits. When I write, I'd rather imagine Bo, the farm's white-puppy lab stray, bounding upon the clustered huge round bales in a side-lot. It's a happy sight because Bo does this for pleasure whenever he gets the urge to do some air scaling. A country dog's adrenaline rush. During a visit once, my nine year old son and I raced Bo across the bales which are about 90 feet by 60 feet (?math?). Ever since then, Bo has adopted this type of entertainment for himself. When we return, we race, and Bo shows off his practice. I like to image Bo jumping without us, Bo being pulse-of-life, Bo wagging his tail and scratching, Bo being alive and real, like I need to be more. Therefore, this blog is named Bo of the Bales in recognition of the farm in the green, the women and men who search for meaning in life's interactions, and the act of leaping from one thing to another. Welcome, readers, kinfolk, country and city bumpkins alike!
I love to write, so stay tuned for more reflections....