Give and take: foraging and small good deeds

[sonia]

Yesterday I walked over to the rose garden, which is a hilly mile away. I've been trying to avoid extra walking in hopes of helping my right achilles tendon stop being swollen, but it seems to be doing somewhat better, and it was a glorious sunny warm day, so off I went.

Along the way, I saw a car parked next to a large median in a wide intersection. The driver was out of the car pulling on a tree in the median, talking animatedly in Arabic with a woman still in the car. I pass through there all the time, and hadn't looked carefully at the tree until I wondered what the man was doing. Oh, it's a fig tree, full of figs. I politely looked away and kept walking.

The rose garden is in a little valley, carefully tended and manicured in the bowl, but with wilder areas around the edges, including sprawling blackberry brambles. It's late in the season, but I managed to forage a few tasty blackberries within my reach.

I sat on a bench for a while and admired the roses, and then walked home. I happened to take the same route back past the fig tree. The car was long gone, so I took a closer look at the tree, and pulled off one large fig. It wasn't fully ripe, but still delicious.

I love receiving the gifts of nature fresh from the plant. It's part of why I like shopping at Farmers Markets, one step closer to that.

I gave back a tiny bit by picking up a discarded plastic water bottle at the rose garden and finding a recycling container to drop it in. Now that I think about it, the garden is remarkably clean given all the people that use it - that's the first trash I remember seeing there.

My other good deed was also about recycling. One of my window blinds broke while it was still under warranty, and the first replacement they sent me was someone else's order - too narrow, too long, and beige rather than soft white. They didn't want it back, so I posted it a couple of times on TrashNothing.com. I was getting resigned to just dismantling it and putting the metal in the recycling when someone wrote and said they could use it. They picked it up yesterday. Yay for reuse rather than generating more trash!

Comments

[dadi]

I so love it when Nature is as bountiful as this year! I have had a lot of apples in my own garden and we already made juice and froze some. Now the apples in the garden of the parish house whee I work are ripe and every morning there is a lot of them on the ground. Everybody I know has gardens with apple trees so nobody wants extra, but I brought a carton of them to the kindergarden across the road and the kids were happy. Tomorrow one of the teachers will come over with the kids and collect more :)

[sonia]

That's a wonderful use for apples! I can imagine making a lot of applesauce, too.

[einhornmaedchen]

The rose garden sounds wonderful! Thank you for picking up the plastic bottle - I detest littering and I think it's great when people pick up trash and throw it in the bin. I do the same.

[sonia]

The rose garden is a treasure, and I appreciate the nice walk to get there, too. Thank you likewise for picking up litter. Small ways of making the world a better place.