Daydreams and Daymares

Sometimes I'd catch an occasional lobster.

One of my recurrent daydreams is to live a life of bucolic splendor, tilling the soil and generally living off the fat of the land.  In this daydream, Nancy and I live at the end of a long drive in a charming house with a deep wrap-around porch.  Everything we need is raised right on premises.  There is a field planted with potatoes, tomatoes, and corn; there are chickens for eggs; honeybees; a couple of cows; a hog.  There are fruit trees.  We have a greenhouse.  Out back I have a fishing hole where I catch fresh catfish and an occasional lobster.  There is a windmill to generate electricity.  Our chest freezer is stocked with venison, squirrel, mailman, rabbit, and any other varmint that tried to mess with our crops.

Thank goodness I can be awakened from this nonsense by the rude jostling of reality.

This time of year the Martin garden is going crazy.  As cooler weather sets in, the plants suddenly realize if they're going to produce any vegetables, they better do it now.  You know how plants are, they wait til the last minute for everything.  Everyday, sometimes twice a day, Nancy and I go out and collect baskets of tomatoes and okra.  We have filled our refrigerator until the refrigerator has said, "I've had alls I can stands and I can't stands no more!"  (We set our refrigerator's speech mode to "Popeye."")  Last night Nancy blanched and put up freezer bags of okra and tomato before it could spoil.

Truthfully, blanching and freezing is not that hard a process, or at least it doesn't look that hard.  We divided up the labor: Nancy did most of the actual blanching and freezing; I kept a careful eye on a Sopranos re-run so we wouldn't miss any important plot points.

Anyway, it wasn't that big a deal, but it was in addition to scraping chicken poop out of the coop and getting the eggs, collecting yet another basket of produce, and monitoring the well-being of a feral barn cat we're habituating in the tool room.

You start to realize that if you had all this in addition to cows, a hog, fruit trees, and ten acres of crops, it might not be quite the idyllic existence one imagines leafing through the seed catalogs, and there might be more to it than just going out and picking a fresh nectarine right off the tree.
 Still.
Maybe one day I could have the lobster pond.