for Jay Salinas and Donna Neuwirth who fell in love with the old Montgomery Farm

A border collie tagging along, the farmer walks us
through his forty acres. It’s gorgeous terrain, steep hills
and rolling ridges. Difficult to farm. What you’d expect
two artists from Chicago to fall in love with —
natural beauty, the allure of the land.

It’s May and the farmer is preparing plots.
He tells us how he’s worked the soil, experimenting
with what grows, the best fertilizer, rotating beds.
This year, he’ll plant cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage—
lots of cabbage—chard, kale, maybe kohlrabi. Lots
of squat work farming vegetables this way.

I ask if he grows rhubarb. Mother’s Day is Sunday
and I’ll make my first rhubarb pie of the year.
He used to, but a resident artist thinking rhubarb
was burdock pulled it out. Looks like I won’t write
an ode to rhubarb.

The farmer leads us down the hill. Surrounded by
a disorder of color—purple and yellow bearded iris, pink peonies,
rambling red rose bushes, the browning tips of lilac bloom—
we walk through the remains of an apple orchard, trees felled
by a great, fallen oak. We pass a plain clapboard house,
a rusted-out truck, a barn that will serve as home
for artists come summer, until

we are in a valley. The soil is richest here. Nutrients wash
from ridges when it rains. This morning onions —Red Spring,
Evergreen Long White—send up straight green stems.
Garlic scapes curl from dirt.

Hanging around a stack of weathered 2 X 8’s, resurrected
from a roadside art installation, we talk about who plants
the fields across the valley, the proliferation of guns,
how ATVs pollute silence. The dog worries a squeaky ball.
A barn cat stretches, then prowls tall grass for critters.
Out here, the farmer tells us, the night sky is splattered with stars.
Dark clouds move in from the west promising a spring storm.

Heading home as rain pelts the windshield, I reflect on
the absurdity that I, a “city girl”, in the middle of my 8th decade,
agreed to write a love song to a vegetable.
It delights me that the farmer will compost my notes,
my drafts, my multiple revisions and work my words
into the soil before pressing in seeds. Until this morning
we were strangers— strangers who traveled long distances
to reach this day. This place. Two people with urban beginnings: one
digging deep into the earth; the other only now scratching the surface.