February 8th 2009

    I have what the wife calls 'muffin top'.  This is not a dress code.  It is a midriff bulge.  A consequence, I hope, of time usefully spent in sedentary pursuits.  

    But, Spring has called a Boat Tailed Grackle, and American Robins are bobbing for territory as they flock in the south field.  All this and the best I can manage is to waddle around the vegetable garden carrying a shovel.

    For a while I feel like that big strawberry, the garden designer.  Butter fingered and immersed in fairyland.  Yet in the soil is the hoppy-bug because I saw its parent amongst the eggplant late last summer.  A beady-eyed queen with lazy wings, her children and relatives will soon be ravenous.  

    I thought too about the aedicule, that space within a space within a space, which adherents to the Winter Solstice Competition contemplate.  The universal.  A singularity.  Whatever its name.

    This is I suppose a belief along the lines of something religious, but without bishops or princes or garden designers.  Nor does the aedicule own that comfort of bishops and princes and garden designers, all of whom will tell you what to think.

    But mostly I made my resolutions:  Tooth-care and weeding.  Tidiness, so I might not lose things.  Shaving more than once a week and bathing more often than that.  These things and the vegetable garden should reduce 'muffin top'.

Tim Candler

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