it is started

"So did you get finished?"

That was the question, after "I saw your photos of your family doing whatever."  She used that word, whatever.

I'm afraid I just blinked.  And finally said something like, "That isn't something you finish."

Even though all my life I have heard people talk about getting the garden "put out", as though it were something done once, at once.  And "putting the garden up" as though you could finish it and put it away.

It is not like that.  I suppose it could be if all you put up was tomatoes.  But if you want salads and greens and peas and cabbage and beans and corn and cucumbers and summer squash and winter squash and potatoes and turnips and and and, well, then it is not.

As one friend of mine puts it: In farming, when you are born there is work to be done; when you die, there is work to be done.  Or as another once said:  Life is work; work is life.  Not employment, not career, not wage or salary, but work worth doing in and of itself; the work of life.  Sometimes that is work that is paid but far far more of it is not, and the less of that we can have, the less we can pay out for other things, the better.  The better off we are, others are, community is, the world is.  And if that is something that you need to "retire" from, well, that is certainly proof it isn't worth doing but rather a selling of your soul.

"You must have had a goal," she said.  Goals are very important to her.  Concrete goals.  Moving right along goals.

"We got started," I said.