6/12/12 Pesto and Sundried Tomatoes

6/12/12

Pesto and Sundried Tomatoes

We’ve been packing for weeks!  Six large boxes of bubble wrap, 32 rolls of packaging tape, dozens of boxes from UHaul and Home Depot, mountains of newspaper and tissue paper, and this really cool wrapping stuff that comes on a roll and sticks to itself (we went through a lot of that).  Dwight created boxes for things that didn’t fit into boxes, and we used several bicycle boxes to pack up art, the TV, an antique Chinese apothecary chest, and, oh yeah, two bicycles.  Furniture that could be dismantled is  dismantled, and all treasures are securely padded.  A few more boxes of stuff have been taken to Goodwill, and neighbors will receive the half-bottles of olives and unused cubes of butter from the ‘frig.  Goodbye Condo.

The day began with a taste of our garden.  At our house on Kerckhoff Avenue we had a large garden – a fantastic mix of perennials, annual flowers, and seasonal vegetables.  We preserved a lot of treats from that bounty, and among those treats were many cups of pesto, made with our basil and garlic, and sundried tomatoes, from our incredible Juliet Romas.  All year long we’ve been enjoying pesto pasta, pesto on crackers, and Dwight’s amazing pesto/sundried tomato pizza (and yes, he makes his own pizza dough from scratch). 

 

We had a little pesto still in the freezer, and a few sundried tomatoes, and a few eggs, and so decided to make a scrambled egg breakfast with them.  It’s wasn’t the last taste of love from our California garden – we still have salsa and jam that we will take with us.  But it was the last of these delights.  We ate it with gratitude.

I have been like a dormant plant in the condo since we moved in late November, waiting out the winter, waiting to sprout and rise.  All that time I’ve missed my garden so much.  I’ve missed the winter pleasure of walking through the yard and snipping a little chard, a little bok choy, a few stems of broccoli, a couple of onion or garlic greens, or whatever was ready to be made into dinner.  Mostly, though, I’ve missed the dirt.  I just love to get my hands in the dirt, feeling what the garden has to say to my skin.

I wonder – will the dirt in Maryland feel the same?  Will the earth recognize me there?  Will the new garden and I get along so well as the last?