Juxtapositions

 “The first supermarket supposedly appeared on the American landscape in 1946. That is not very long ago. Until then, where was all the food? Dear folks, the food was in homes, gardens, local fields, and forests. It was near kitchens, near tables, near bedsides. It was in the pantry, the cellar, the backyard.”

― Joel Salatin, Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World

Two houses over, an elderly Japanese couple harvest runner beans. On Saturdays, she hangs laundry out, draping it over the deck railings, chairs, and the stair risers. On weekdays, the two of them putter about the gardens, pulling a weed here, staking a plant there. Today, they harvest and, occasionally, the old gentleman climbs a rickety ladder to reach the beans, the most sun-kissed ones, at the top. She scolds him, I assume by tone as they don’t speak English, to be careful and to not be so foolish at his age.  He ignores her silently and continues to pluck the best of the beans, filling a woven basket to overflowing, then climbs carefully back down the ladder rungs. Slippered step by slow step.

Two houses over in the other direction, a man takes a small bull dozer to the yard of a house that is, though not being torn down like the hapless house across the street, is, nonetheless, being mutilated and altered and destroyed in various ways. The destructive noise goes on all day as the bulldozer runs up and down, up and down, the yard – until there is nothing left of what was there. The cigarette never leaves the place of its perpetual hanging from the man’s lip. It burns as though it is an eternal flame.