Things are getting dirty

I have been spending quite a bit of time here at Suncrest with Heather's 3 year old son Ethan. Each morning Ethan comes over to visit the root cellar where the interns live and we do normal things like hunt for mice and fold clothes. As I leave the cellar to head to the barn to start the morning's chores, Ethan - every day, without fail - asks "does your mom let you get your pants dirty like that?". He has a point. I don't think my mom would care, but the folks at J.Crew would probably scoff at how their pants are currently being treated. Though I guess it's been this way for a couple years now (if you measure my dirtiness by my bridesmaid duties in the past two summers being reduced from 'get a manicure' to 'scrub your hands'), today I felt particularly proud of my heightened comfort level with being really dirty.


Until this afternoon: tomato harvest. Heather and her intern Theresa ran out of time to trellis the tomatoes earlier in the season, so the plants now lay sprawled across the ground. To harvest them we had to tiptoe through the rows like we were walking through minefields, careful not to squash anything under our feet. The problem came when I started picking the ripe tomatoes off the vine. At every second or third pluck, I would wrap my hand around the fruit only to have my fingers sink into a mushy gross wetness on the other side. The tomatoes looked perfect on the upside, but many had rotted on the bottom from touching the ground. I made the mistake of wrapping my whole hand around the tomato several times - cringing at each go - before I trained myself to only touch what I could see. Of course five minutes later, too caught up in the positioning of my toes and knees on the minefield, I would forget and grab the whole tomato again. Yuck! 


And so there you have it. Just when I was making progress - away from pretty city clothes and hyper cleanliness - I slide back as I gag at that 200 foot row of half-rotten tomatoes.

The fruits of some 3 year old labour: 
here is the result of a morning of clothes-folding help from Ethan.