The Delectability of Being

It's a full time job doing what I usually do and what Mike usually does. Emptied our composting toilet for the first time today. Wasn't as bad as I'd feared (I'm awful with bad smells).

Thought you'd prefer a photo of some of our grapefruit rather than that, though. Pretty upset that I've probably pruned the tree way too hard. Can you see the long legged spider peeking out? (Probably not possible on a phone.) They give me the creeps, we have so many of them.

(I'm not ignoring America, Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan - but focusing on here. The heart feels heavy, but this day, here, is a gift, and I want to be grateful for it.)

Capon, ch11, "Better a Dinner of Herbs...", on getting your kids to eat a balanced diet:
    I grant you that my children need their meals balanced. If you like, I shall take the pledge here and now to see to it that they get their greens along with their starches. My own feeling, however, is that they need something else even more. They need to have their tastes unbalanced: to have them skewed, driven off dead center, and fastened firmly on the astonishing oddness of the world. If they get a course from me at all, it should not be a string of lectures... but a series of laboratory sessions where their senses can be exposed to the delectability of being as such.
     True enough, food is only one small corner of the field. They need these experiments even more in music, art and literature, and they need them most of all in their relationships with people - the most startling realities on earth; but for all that, the table is not a bad place to start.


Must say, our kids were never fussy about food. Maybe growing up in a community where many didn't have enough to eat gave them a different mindset?