Another Tomato for Teleri

Another morning photograph, playing with shadows and an heirloom tomato from yesterday's farmers' market -- and just as I was about to post this image, I saw that Veronica had also posted a tomato, home-grown in her case, with a lovely remembrance of Chaiselongue/Teleri.

So I add mine to hers, grateful for the love of local, simple cooking that the three of us shared, and for the gift of appreciating shadows that Chaiselongue's wonderful photos gave me.

Today LoJardinier, Chaiselongue's husband, posted the first entry since her death on his plant blog, an entangled bank, words from his heart.

The Wheel by American poet, writer, and farmer Wendell Berry (b. 1934), encompasses these connections for me:

At the first strokes of the fiddle bow
the dancers rise from their seats.
The dance begins to shape itself
in the crowd, as couples join,
and couples join couples, their movement
together lightening their feet.
They move in the ancient circle
of the dance. The dance and the song
call each other into being. Soon
they are one -- rapt in a single
rapture, so that even the night
has its clarity, and time
is the wheel that brings it around.

In this rapture the dead return.
Sorrow is gone from them.
They are light. They step
into the steps of the living
and turn with them in the dance
in the sweet enclosure
of the song, and timeless
is the wheel that brings it round.