But that left more time for foraging. To begin with, garage sale style. I happened on happiness: a sale underadvertised, a house with a lifetime of stuff, miraculously unravaged by early birds and dealers. Then it turns out that the guy who accumulated it shares my name, right down to the non-standard pronunciation. I now have his thermos, the kind my dad and namesake uncle both carried, right down to the replacement handle (it's missing the cup, but I have one). And a vice that can clamp to the workbench, which is something I've been looking for for decades. Perfect. The guy's bowling ball even fit my digits like a glove, a crazy head-konking fatigue-inducing glove.
Then later, some outside foraging. My younger daughter walked with me to a neighborhood park plagued with stinging nettles, which are still pickable. She played on the swing and explored the woodland path while I squatted and snapped the tender tips, filling a couple of grocery bags. I'll make a quiche for dinner tonight, and freeze the rest. Probably will pick another couple rounds, freezing some and drying the rest for tea, before the season is over. Once you cover yourself to keep from getting stung, nettles are easy to gather, because they form dense patches and love to colonize trail margins, and nobody laments their disappearance or diminishment.
I guess I'm supposed to have some nice photos, food porn shots: macro focus on the hoary purple-green leaf buds (ok, maybe marijuana porn) laying on a richly orange wooden table fuzzing into the depth of field, the hand-made Andean basket filled with a Van Gogh swoosh of sprigs, stuff like that. But what I have is a pair of plastic grocery bags full of wet smooshed leaves.
But they were free. It was a nice opening day.
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