“I gotta go, ‘cuz Mellow’s getting anxious.”

Mellow, a charcoal Bichon Frise, pulls at the end of his leash and attempts to reach Bob and me with his forepaws as we walk up a strip of crumbled sidewalk in the city of Schenectady’s Stockade district.  

His owner, talking to another fellow on a stoop, sports flip flops,  a ponytail and loose shorts, and a beer belly that pushes his tye-dye shirt out enough to show the full splendor of its colors.   Mellow, I surmise in passing, is a commitment both spiritual and temporal, and he holds his master to a covenant of mellow-ness, keeping  their shared world chilled-out and easy.

Once we pass them, Bob and I both laugh out loud.  It’s a brilliant name for a dog; a brilliant way to commit to a life path, and a brilliant gift of a sentence to stumble upon while wandering the streets of Schenectady.  

Saoirse is enrolled in a drama workshop  at Proctors for the entire week, so while she is sequestered away in an air-conditioned theater, Bob and I have chosen this day to explore the city on foot, and we’re returning through the historic district from a ramble along the Mohawk river. There we sat beneath a shade tree and rested, our bodies still weary from the adors of the weekend farmers’ market and cafe.  We watched a great blue heron glide up the river, a few gulls dive and swoop, and heard a cardinal call out from behind us.  Layered over all of it was the omnipresent hiss of cicadas, rising up from the grasses, calling down from the branches, penetrating our souls with a sibilant reminder to move slow, breathe deep, and honor the covenant of mellow-ness.

I love the sound of cicadas, but on this day I feel my ears tuning in, searching for one sound that is missing from this quiet stretch of downtown Schenectady.  There are no black field crickets.

Right now, our the fields around my kitchen are thrumming with crickets. On Saturday and Sunday, after arriving home from the cafe,  I threw the doors open as I worked to can a batch of tomato sauce.  The stereo stays off this time of year in favor of the crickets.  They are the metronome of the harvest season, beating time from late July until the last frost, setting the pace for canning, freezing and slaughter until the grass is finally coated with the white rime that signals the arrival of our own family’s commitment to mellow.  

But in this moment, walking up that scorching city sidewalk, I’m jealous of Mellow and his master.  They make it all look so easy, this choice to keep one’s world cool and calm.  

My world doesn’t feel easy right now.  At home the counters are sticky and littered with molding garden produce; clothes changed while running are strewn across the floors; weeds poke through the patio stones, and cobwebs and dust are gathering in the corners of the windows.  The fridge is a nightmare unto itself, deep storage of forgotten rotting leftovers longing to enrich our compost pile.  

I pine for a stretch of days to sort and clean, to wipe down the counters, polish the arms of the chairs; to put the house to rights and rejuvinate my spirit.  But this is the entropy of summer, and every year, despite my winter commitments to tidiness, the first week of August looks the same.

I ignored all of it as I canned tomato sauce Saturday and Sunday.  My hands slid over the fruit on autopilot, lightly skimming the skin to test for ripeness before slicing them; then chopping the garlic, and sauteing the onions.  I paid little attention to any of it; because I was focused on those crickets.  When they pulse outside my kitchen door, I am joined by the ghost of Ruth, my surrogate grandmother who lived on the farm up the road as I was growing up.

The crickets bring me back to her kitchen as she taught me how to make jelly,  and passed on her language of spoken recipes so that I learned to cook from her anecdotes, with no time given to perusing cookbooks.

Ruth lived at that farm from the time she was sixteen, after she was hit by a car and forced to quit school.  It was during the Great Depression when her mother gave her to the Fancher family as a hired girl so she’d have one less mouth to feed.  And while the men at the CCC camp down the road earned a dollar a day plus room and board; Ruth’s future unfolded at a salary of $2 per week to cook and clean for the family and borders who inhabited the farm; to raise the children, care for the dying and provide the services of a wife and mother without ever receiving the proclamation of love that typically lures a woman into such labors.  

I came to know her in her sixties, and in our twenty-plus years of friendship, she came to love me.  And I loved her.  But as her spectre floats among the crickets outside my kitchen porch in August, she shakes her head in disgust.  The house she tended was never in such disarray.  The garden was kept, the vegetables didn’t go bad, the fridge was always clean, and she died with about ten years’ supply of canned fruits and vegetables in the cellar.  And despite all the work she did, she managed to sit out on a plastic chair in her yard under a tree every night in August, listening to those crickets.  And when I was up there helping, I was expected to join her.  She’d hand me a dish of ice cream, and no matter how much work was in the day, there would be a final hour or two to feel mellow.  I was happy at her side.  It never occurred to me to ask if she’d have preferred a different life.  And now, looking back, I know she would never have dared ask that question of herself.  

My house might be in better shape if we stayed home all week through the summer, tending solely to the food, the business and the housekeeping.  But we don’t.  We encourage our daughters to do all the things that farming doesn’t reputedly allow:  sailing programs, circus school, wilderness camp, theater workshops.  For two months, between farm and business responsibilities, we race to let Saoirse and Ula have chances to tackle new and interesting challenges with their peers.  And the languid lure of feeling mellow for Bob and me is short: a few minutes on the porch at the end of the day, all-too-sporadic hikes in the woods or out to waterfalls.  

As I see Mellow pull his leash  to direct his master down to the Mohawk for some mellow time, I ponder the critical difference between Ruth’s choices and my own.

And I stop in my tracks on that singular word:  choices.  Ruth didn’t have any.    Damaged in an automobile accident, packed off as soon as she could walk again (albeit with a lifetime limp), and given the life of a slave, she knew only to work hard to keep the roof over her head.  She didn’t stop to reflect whether this life with gardens,  canning jars, beds to make, laundry to hang, grazing cattle, homemade pie and late summer crickets was what she would have chosen.  These were her options for survival, plain and simple.  

Yet here we are, a few miles away in a new millenia, opting for a version of Ruth’s life by choice.  We drive our daughters to all these activities for one singular reason:  we want them to have a choice, too.  My fear is that they will come back to this life because they know no other; that, like Ruth, they will be afraid to ask what else the world might hold for them. I will not have my children be slaves to the life I have freely chosen.  And so, on this city sidewalk in the dog days of August, I appreciate Mellow’s mission in life.  He has important work to do: keep calling the citizens of this world to be mellow.  And he reminds me that it matters.  So I breathe and let his mellow aura cleanse my harried soul, knowing that before long, the frost will settle on the ground, the tomatoes and green beans will be canned, the meat will be in the freezer,  and all will be mellow once more.