Beltane                                                           Emergence Moon

Yesterday morning, while planting cucumbers in hills, making rows of bush beans to cover their base, fanning the collard greens out along the north side of the bed, the swiss chard to the east and the eggplants to the west, leaving room for marigolds in the center where it’s hard to reach, I called Mickman’s, our irrigation company.

We pay Mickman’s a yearly fee to come out and start up our irrigation system, checking for heads damaged over the winter and making sure everything works correctly. They also close it down in the fall, bringing an air compressor to blow out the lines so no water remains in them to freeze and burst the pcv pipes and the plastic heads. This year I realized I had had no word from them about the spring service.

When I called them, yes they had my service contract, yes they would get to me, no they hadn’t tried to contact me yet because they were far behind due to the cold weather. When I told them I had plants (vegetables just planted) that needed water, the earliest they could get out here was next Wednesday. With full sun and some heat projected for today and tomorrow I pressed them. “What are you asking for?” Water for my plants.

After I hung up, settling for a late Tuesday appointment, a strain of contrarian thought streaked through my head. Who needs them? I’ll start it up myself. I’ve never done it, still haven’t, but I’m going to try today because my vegetables need to be watered in. We’ve had them do this start up for the last 20 years and in all that time starting up the system never occurred to me. Strange. It made me wonder how much else I have done for me that I could do myself.

This loops me back to a thought that comes to me, often about this time of year, that I am lord of the manor. In an odd way we have replaced the old English manor house. No baize doors. No downstairs and upstairs. Yet we have a cleaning lady, lawn care service, irrigation specialists, arborists, electricians, septic cleaners, window washers, a handyman, roof and siding replacers, generator maintenance guy, painters and a contractor for home remodeling.

This list does not include, but can, the washing machine and the dryer, the refrigerator, the television, the fitness equipment, a lawn tractor, the microwave, the electric sewing machine, several computers, cell phones, a landline, a freezer and a horseless carriage. These last are all labor saving devices. Yes, they replace actual laborers who at one time would have been employed for laundry, bringing in ice, cooking, lawn care, message delivery and transportation outside the home.

This means that though we have the patina of a single family living in their own home, alone, the reality is much more complex and all of it requires management of one sort or another. Relationships have to be built, skills assessed, work evaluated, checks written, needs for service monitored. None of this is, in itself, remarkable, but when looked at in the aggregate it shows how a family serves as the nexus of a complex web of services, some engaged by humans who live outside the home in their own home, some by machines, but often machines far too complicated for a home owner to service, which requires appliance repair and/or replacement people.

I guess it’s not odd that starting up the irrigation system never occurred to me.