WeakNotes July 2025 - Week 2

Jul 13, 2025

This weekend we spent some time in the garden which, overall, has not had the best year. This is our first full season at Contrecoeur, and although we are not entirely new to gardening, we're still learning the ropes here -- especially at the scale we are aiming for, which is larger than anything we've previously done, and alongside the many additional tasks of owning eight acres. A very rainy and stormy early spring, building our chicken coop, and other pressing tasks left our garden plans delayed and neglected.

So a lot of the work was simply cleaning up weeds and determining what is thriving and what's not. We have a few winners. Tomatoes, for instance, are thriving -- both the ones we planted and volunteers from last year! Our peppers? Not so much.

Especially frustrating were two new raised beds we installed and filled a mere month ago. In a very short span of time, they became absolutely swamped with a particularly hungry and dense weed, to the point that we may just cover the boxes with a tarp to kill off the roots in the soil -- which would mean starting fresh with a fall planting, or perhaps not making use of them until next year.

It's easy to get discouraged.

But look -- garlic! We planted two varieties of hardneck garlic last year, Purple Glazer and German Red. We planted around 40 cloves and today harvested 35 bulbs -- not bad! Two of the bulbs were rough or uber-tiny, and so got tossed, and one bulb got nicked while harvesting. But we now have 32 bulbs hanging to cure.

I've found it helpful to count these types of successes and keep them somewhere ready-to-hand, to help balance out the inevitable disappointments and struggles. No reason not to make those public, so I added them here: A Diary of Accomplishments (And Maybe a Few Failures) at Contrecoeur.

Continuing to read through Samantha Harvey's Orbital at a leisurely pace -- about one or two sections ("orbits") per day is plenty for a book like this, where there is not a lot of hard plot and there is a great deal of exploration. I should finish that and Caputo's Against Ethics this week.

Some other very pleasant reading surprises this week:

• A volume of Elizabeth Spencer came my way, a name I know but have never explored. Needing a bit of something before bed, I read through the first short story in the collection, "First Night," and found it exceptional -- a ghost story, in many ways, with its hauntings here intersecting with the South's history of race and segregation. Three other stories in so far and all were great. Spencer writes the American South in these stories with a really lively voice, like these are stories being told; from what I've read so far, she has a knowing eye on the complicated history of the South, too. Looking forward to reading more.
• I began reading Jay Wright's Transfigurations, which is basically his collected poetry. Wright's name is not new to me but his poetry is. Was led there in part by an excellent poem in June's Poetry by Georgio Russell, "Eloquence," which quotes Wright for an epigraph. Wright writes a great deal of religion and history, an easy route to capturing my interest -- but that feels a reductive description. I'll almost certainly write on him soon.
• A blog post from philosopher Elizabeth Barnes, The Personal Value of Conversations Across Serious Disagreement, resonates deeply with the Helen De Cruz article I mentioned last week ("Friendship with the Ancients").

Since De Cruz's article, it's been hard not to note moments of friendship a bit more intentionally than I have in the past.

Sometimes between the living, such as In the deeply funky and joyous album from Charlie Hunter and Ella Feingold. There is a live-wire connection between these two, whose happiness in collaboration here is infectious. I've been playing "Nasty Ain't It" on repeat.

Or in the friendship between Charles Erskine Scott Wood and his partner, Sara Bard Field. I began some closer research and CES Wood this week, including some skimming of an excellent dual biography on Wood and Field entitled Bohemians West: Free Love, Family, and Radicals in Twentieth-Century America (Sherry L. Smith). Wikipedia describes Wood as a "partner and mentor" to Sara Bard Field, but what is clear from my reading thus far is that Wood was as much a mentee of Field's as Field was of Wood.

But also in the way Caputo speaks of and with his fellow philosophers in his work, whether they are alive or passed, such as Lyotard, Levinas, Nietzsche, Derrida, and Kierkegaard. the way he hugs them even as he disagrees with them, the way he lets them be even when he calls out problems in their thought, the way he makes room for their fullness and learns from it without letting them limit his own thinking.

We should all be so lucky to find these partners, whether in our present, in the traces of the past, or in visions of the future.