An excess of tomatoes and who says carrots have to be orange?

The tomatoes are coming in. I suppose they actually arrived last week (or maybe even the week before) but today I stood surrounded by buckets of red, orange, yellow, green and splattered heirlooms (the best ones!) and my jaw dropped.
"Henry! This is a lot of tomatoes."
Henry is Harriet's hubby, her words, and he comes in on Thursdays to help with CSAs. He is a large man, shouting greetings upon seeing you and laughing often. He stood up, smiled and shook his head. We have many, many tomato plants on the farm and, still, it's pretty amazing how much food they can produce. Duh, stupid-frick Alvin. There will be more tomatoes. Oh yes, says Henry, there will be tomatoes.
So I picked, washed, packed beets, among other normal Thursday things to do on the farm (ask Matty K. if you don't know) and wiped, inspected, packaged the tomatoes. I did so standing next to the trailer that had every space filled with garlic, the gigantic, ever-whirling industrial fan setting them to dry and cure. Yep. Garlic, wiping down lovely tomatoes, Alyssa pulling leeks from the cooler every now and then, Matty washing and wrapping up basil, Harriet pulling in with green peppers, white peppers, PURPLE peppers. EGGPLANTS! I thought of a hundred cheesy love songs to sing to the symphony of flavors and aromas, dancing about there on the garden. Me, the deeply-tanned Asian, wearing a hairnet over his unbridled mane, cheerily wiping down a Cherokee Chocolate - the best name for a tomato variety ever - and (softly, but passionately) singing Barry Manilow.

No jolts, no surprises
No crisis arises - the years go along as they should
It's all very nice, but not very good...

Annnnd I'm ready to take a chance again,
ready to put my love on the line with you
Been living with nothing to show for it,
you get what you get when you go for it,
and I'm ready to take a chance again with you.

Yes, when you are moved to simultaneously take pictures and cook, it is a good thing. I've read that they go bonkers in Italy when the first tomato harvest comes in. They gather and celebrate and speak loudly with lavish hand motions and drink wine and play music and hug and laugh and cook! I need you to help me!

Or anyway, I hope you are well.
Eat a good tomato in the simplest way you can, wherever you are.
And here I'll be, slices of red, orange, yellow, green, pink, black and swirly colored
with basil, olive oil, salt and vinegar.

If we get spinach after the weekend, BLTs. (Sioux Centerites, let's pack 'em up and go fishing!)

Love!

These, four bags of green beans and more cucumbers than I could comfortably carry by myself are the perks from this week. Getting a farmer's tan is fun, but fitting in photo and video is a sleepless challenge.

Quick update: Mom, David and, now, Dad are all home. Dad arrived last night and is fighting a thirteen hour jet-lag. Paul came and went last week with eight Youth Group kids from home. It was good having a bunch of Asian kids romping around the living room. More Asians, even, than the Vander Plaats family. Take that!

Jess and I were approached and offered a job as a video production company today. Pretty cool. A rough shooting schedule was discussed, documents were passed out, business cards were exchanged... ...well, Jess and I received business cards, but it was still cool. Piper, you're missing all the magic! Let Jake plan the wedding from here out and be a part of this!

Is there a good place, around Sioux Center, to go fishing?

The Youth Group kids went camping in Colorado before they stopped here. I was just looking at some of their photos on facebook and I was drooling. I don't know, or I forget, which National Park they went to, but it is gorgeous. It makes me sad, looking at the calendar for the rest of summer and not finding a spot to be SPONTANEOUS and DANGEROUS and THRILLING and packing up to camp for a week or so... there is the farm, where I am absent enough already, a Dordt video, a Lao video, the darkroom, my da.
But I do have a fishing pole...
and a year's fishing license...

And seriously, it's the summer time. Let's go! Let's sleep outside!

My dad just came down munching on a handful of blueberries and said he was hungry. Mmmm blueberries.

Facebook tells me I have 363 friends. My brothers went to a wedding this summer with 2,000 + people. That's crazzzzzy, I said. I don't think I'd even have 363 people at my wedding. I better marry someone with tons of friends. Friends that don't suck or are boring. ALSO, she better want to go camping in the summer time.

Every morning there were planes,
the shining blades of pagan angels
in our fathers' skies.

I surprised my mum this evening by turning in to bed at quarter past nine. That's 9:15 PM, central time. Yes, it's a big week at work and I really wanted to be able to get up in the morning, but the bottom line was

I was tired
and there was a persistent ache in my head.

So I lay on my bed and read a few pages from my new book... which turned into finishing one of the five chapters that make up the book... which cured my headache and made me think of so many people the narrative drew up. The setting is in Seattle, the protagonist's father plants a garden and sets aside a small plot for her son - he puts down seeds of Lego pieces and pennies.

The cucumbers are coming in. They're tiny, a little spikey and shaped like little pears. Absolutely adorable. Completely.

Tomatoes have been in their green clusters for some time now. The biggest plant has some turning red and ripening like jewels, placed hidden behind green, vibrant leaves at the base of the stalk.

The pepper plants are growing taller. Greener too. Almost a dark green. There isn't any developing fruit to be seen, but they are growing like weeds.

The maples stand straight and strong, six, seven inches high, but their leaves aren't as proud as they were before. Still there though, still fighting it.

I can't sleep, as you can read. It's quarter to midnight.

The Iron & Wine show we saw in Iowa City is a gorgeous meditation at night, even if you think you should be asleep. It has me imagining the touches, the extremely disciplined touches that each musician put into each song. It has me debating which is the most beautifully written song, changing my vote with every track starting again.

My list of postal correspondence addresses grows as well. Be patient, all of you. They take a long time to write.

I'd like to be somewhere without television, internet, responsibilities of the working kind - I've been shirking the film and the camera and other "Oh, I'll get to do that in the summer," activities for... however long summer has been so far.

Anyway, it's late. The week will start very soon.

She leaned on her colored hair,
like a butterfly wing in a summer rainfall.

Someone I know once said, to the general audience of whoever would listen (perhaps including herself), that acting is her escape. This stuck with me, as only some things do, for a year or so now. I went running tonight, around one in the morning, as a late celebration for Independence Day. Legs extended and arms swiftly pumping in fluid motion and it was so... something I realized would be always more of a raw experience than any song or film or chapter, because I was aware of my heart pumping, my toes springing off the road with each step, the smell of oak trees and lilacs wafting in and out of the path, my shadow sinking and rising with the streetlights and jumping harder, kicking higher to the corner and, with one swift stomp, turning down the other street. It always sat odd with me, what she said, to escape from worries and obstacles by putting on another person and living their life. Especially in the context of theater. Who has more conflict than a character on stage? Running through the town of Sioux Center at night, in the cool, summer stage, I listened to a few songs, songs whose lyrics I would love to plaster onto here but I won't because it would be both excessive in space and incomplete in essence. Yes, the essence. But, to list a couple,
Someone Great - LCD Soundsystem
House by the Sea - Iron & Wine
Each song's dedicated to a specific person and, usually, a specific time and place and it was a terrific and eventful run. The hype and high bled into the shower and teeth brushing after, bouncing from one leg to the other and keeping me awake even further into the night.
There is no escape, and I mean this in the least dooming way possible. I'm not talking about hope - there is always hope (and I mean that in the least cheesy way possible). What I'm saying is that after my run with God and her efficiency, design, nature, providence, children, I sat on my porch and... almost in a way that completely offset the run... unhinged my ears and mind to take in worry and conflict and all those things. There is no escape. I was mistaken and naive to think that things would be different after the run. But there was more than one story told tonight, staring at the sky and occasionally mistaking fireflies for shooting stars. Story after story after story and the leg slams the foot down, the foot propels the body forward, the arm swings back while the other comes forward and the other leg bends at the knee to start it all over again. There's a lot to be afraid of, but there are also, for the lucky and blessed ones, more than enough people to think about during late night runs, beautiful people to laugh and breathe and share the stars with afterward.

I was a quick, wet boy diving too deep for coins
All of your street light eyes wide on my plastic toys
Then, when the cops closed the fair,
I cut my long, baby hair,
Stole me a dog-eared map and
Called for you everywhere...

Have I found you, flightless bird?

-Flightless Bird, American Mouth by Iron & Wine off of The Shepherd's Dog.
I couldn't help myself.