{"id":8063,"date":"2021-09-11T11:56:10","date_gmt":"2021-09-11T16:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/?p=8063"},"modified":"2021-09-11T11:56:10","modified_gmt":"2021-09-11T16:56:10","slug":"looking-up","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/2021\/09\/looking-up\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Up"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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THE LOOP AROUND<\/span><\/strong> Nat\u2019s Farm field dips down through a scrubby glade along Old County Road before it takes a roughly 90-degree turn and begins to rise again. If you\u2019re walking the trail, as we were this weekend, you\u2019ll hardly notice the gentle incline passing under your feet as you make your way from shade to light, swinging left, then right, to skirt an evergreen bowing the path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a point, though, when your eyes \u2013 at least on a brilliant September day \u2013 will likely send a message back to mission control to put the brakes on your forward motion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before you, at the crest of the path, is a vast swath of blue sky painted across the horizon, a brilliant counterpoint to the rich golds and greens of the wildflowers and grasses in the pasture beneath it. It is such an open and expansive view that you could be out West, not on Martha\u2019s Vineyard.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That sky, that color! To me it is Carolina blue and always will be. It\u2019s a deeply nostalgic color, the color of childhood and the happiest of warm summer days. The field is glorious and nurturing, too. As we keep walking, I bend down to catalogue the latest declension of wildflowers signaling summer’s end. Tiny star-shaped purple asters, random Black Eyed Susans, and clutches of scarlet Sumac berries have replaced the Queen Anne\u2019s lace and flowering vetch from a few weeks back. And everywhere, knitting sky to field, those yellow fronds of goldenrod.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking down on a walk is routine. Looking up is different. It requires stopping.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have been looking up at the September sky a lot lately. Not just on our walks, but in the garden, too, where nearly everything that is still alive and thriving towers over me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I have to turn my camera up to photograph the tithonia, the dahlias, the zinnias, the pole beans, the return of the cherry tomatoes, the sweet peas, the sunflowers, and the cosmos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once my eye is trained up there, I can\u2019t help but linger on the brilliance of the sky. Some mornings I just stand in the garden, close my eyes, tilt my chin to the sun and bask a minute. Maybe say a little prayer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking up, after all, is a form of reverence. I remember being astonished when I saw my dying mother-in-law, a deeply religious woman completely at peace with moving on, reach up from her bed with her frail arms several times during her last hours, as if she was greeting someone on the other side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s not been lost on me as September 11th<\/sup>\u00a0has neared how blue the sky was on that day 20 years ago. We woke up that morning and looked up at that cheery sky, na\u00efve and grateful for the sunshine, only to watch with horror as it turned gray a few hours later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I was reading my colleague Paul Schneider\u2019s poignant essay in the Vineyard Gazette yesterday,\u00a0Waves of Grief Roll in Twenty Years Later<\/a>, all of my own memories of that day flowed back to me. Strangely that blue sky is in most every vignette I recall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The scenes are vivid, starting with my sunglassed drive up through the Connecticut hills to my office. But of the many frames from the September 11 reel in my head, one stands out most.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By midmorning, our office in Newtown had closed, and when I returned home, driving down eerily empty roads to the coast, it was just me and my 85-year-old father-in-law to huddle together. We decided to walk down the street to a small park on a point jutting out into Long Island Sound. We stood together looking over the water at lower Manhattan, and there against that azure sky was a plume of grey smoke, visible from so far away. We wondered aloud about all the commuters from our town who were likely right there. Some of them friends. Would they be on the train coming home that night? We didn’t know then that the trains weren’t even running.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The last frames in my film memories are all grey, of course. Everyone\u2019s are. The smoke erased the blue sky at Ground Zero, and it would be a long time before it would reappear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This morning I wanted to post a photo of a distinctly tower-esque 12-foot\u00a0helianthus salicifolius\u00a0<\/em>(perennial willow sunflower) on Instagram for #day70 in my\u00a0#100daysofflowersandveggies<\/a>\u00a0series. This crazy plant was a gift from Polly Hill Arboretum director Tim Boland, and I had no idea it would get so tall and branch so much. It is covered with hundreds of green buds, and we have been waiting for the flowers to bloom for weeks. This morning the first bud turned to bloom and many more showed hints of yellow \u2013 against a deep blue sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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I took my photos and came inside to crop the images. To my surprise, in every frame a looming daddy long legs was smothering the top bloom. Not that I can blame the daddy long legs, but it was a little creepy. The things you don’t see with your naked eye!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You just never know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Look up, look down, look all around today. Grab the moments of beauty and hold on to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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LOOKING FOR RECIPES?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Visit cookthevineyard.com<\/a> and sign up for the free weekly newsletter<\/a>. (Something I do as part of my day job.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

THE LOOP AROUND Nat\u2019s Farm field dips down through a scrubby glade along Old County Road before it takes a roughly 90-degree turn and begins to rise again. If you\u2019re walking the trail, as we were this weekend, you\u2019ll hardly notice the gentle incline passing under your feet as you make your way from shade […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[168,149,163,162],"tags":[222],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8063"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8063"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8063\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8080,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8063\/revisions\/8080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sixburnersue.com\/cooking-fresh-eating-green\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}