toil and pleasure
I had the good fortune of spending some moments with a friend yesterday. It was the first of our bulk fruit orders of the season. Longtime readers will know that I have an organic fruit buying club I started up years ago. It’s my way of ensuring I get my grubby little paws on some beautiful, local fruit every summer. Cherries are first up this year. Boxes and boxes of glistening, ruby red orbs of delight. There’s nothing like a sweet, juicy cherry plucked off a tree only hours before you sink your teeth into it.
Fruit delivery days are busy. Our driver leaves the Niagara region and makes his way through the nightmare that is the super-highways (super condensed, that is) of Toronto. It never ceases to impress me that he always arrives in such good cheer. He’s a middle aged German fellow that has better things to do than bring us fruit, but bring us fruit, he does. I have yet to see him get out of his truck without a smile, gulping in the fresh air and marvelling at the beauty of the countryside. The traffic is behind him and his spirits are always high to visit with us for a short time and to absorb the quiet green surrounding us.
After the truck is off-loaded, we set to amalgamating the fruit into piles and rows according to the orders of each group. There is the inevitable heart-racing panic when a box is missing or misplaced into another groups in error. We lift and move hundreds of boxes, all of them 20 or 25 pounds heavy with fruit. It’s a task, to be sure, and we have to hustle. At any moment, the cars will start pulling into our driveway, each representing a buying group coming for the orders. There’s often little time to visit and chat, but it’s nice when we can.
Yesterday, I had the rare luxury of spending some time with the friend I mentioned at the beginning of this essay. She’s the kind of friend I see infrequently, but think of with affection. Both she and her husband are such cool cats. Open-hearted, grounded cool cats. I don’t see her often, but she’s just the kind of gal that holds no pretence and asks none of anyone else. She’s solid in her being without concern for the interpretation thereof. I respect that immensely in people.
Our ideas on politics and maybe social justice and stuff of that nature are likely different. I don’t know, but I think so. I don’t really care. That’s the thing of burrowing into a life, the things at the surface just get scratched away. Sometimes you meet people, mostly I meet people, that prefer that place, up on top where the shallow waters remain always lukewarm - pleasant and predictable. That’s okay, too. But when you find that soul that meets you in the dark, and you can come together into the light, it’s infinitely brighter than what you find alone.
I suppose the thing that impresses me most about this couple is that they are the only people we know whose decisions around how to live their lives have so impressed us. It doesn’t mean we don’t know many people living good lives. Not at all. But we don’t have friends that have so carefully crafted where they put their time and energy with such indifference to the trappings of our culture.
They consistently and conscientiously choose to live at a pace of slowness that allows