Daddy, why are there worms biting my feet?

 

Imagine you’re eleventy months pregnant when planting the year’s garden. If you can’t imagine yourself at such an unimaginable gestational length of time, I’ll disclose that gardening in such a condition entails rolling between rows on your own girth, or a general butt-scooting amid the feeling that one’s entire viscera are about to bow down to gravity. The resulting plot of fecundity is admittedly just a tad disjointed, with a few random sprigs of dill in your potato patch and a singular as-yet-unidentified member of the squash family claiming squatter’s rights in your spinach. If nothing else, the place isn’t lacking in character.

Then imagine that it’s a couple of months later, and after having successfully survived both the state of being eleventy months pregnant and the inevitable harvesting and immediate aftermath of your own overripe fruit, you suddenly remember your big neglected project. I was half-expecting to walk into some neat secret-garden-world. Instead, with tomatoes vining on the ground and peas drying on the vines, the place looks like a decoy crop for an amateur marijuana farmer long taken over by cinematic woodland trolls from the nineteen eighties.

But the place has not devolved into total disrepair. We recently welcomed our first out-of-town guests with the de-luxe accommodations of a tent platform almost as big as our cabin and probably, at this point, on more level ground:

Should you have the desire to visit, now’s the time, so long as you don’t mind performing a little requisite garden restoration and baby-cooing. A visit here is sure to include a head full of staples (me) and marveling of the local wildlife (our seven-year-old friend, whose curious mind, pre leech-plucking, inspired the title of today’s post).  It’s the cheapest holiday you’ll take, with free flesh-stapling and bloodletting to boot!