*Potatoes.

*It's been so dry here, yesterday afternoon I dug up the 3/4 row of red potatoes, whose tops had browned out weeks ago...

*They weren't big  -- only a score as large as the palm of my hand -- but with enough stew potatoes to fill  a medium box.  They smell great, nice and hard, and I only sliced one with my tree spade. Not enough to sell, but plenty to share and for personal consumption.

*Naturally,
 I thought of Seamus Heaney as I worked:  it was so dry, the roots didn't go deep before the plants  died, so it was more dusty than dirty labor.  There's a good line in that great 1979 movie Breaking  Away, where the college-impersonating "townie" schoolboy figures out where exactly he fits in, as a young American coming from a working-class culture into the seeming snobbery of a campus that doesn't appreciate the men who physically built the place.

*I'm paraphrasing, but the father essentially tells the son, "We were the cutters, not you and your  friends..."  He's essentially reminding him of why his generation physically took on the tasks of building the future, so the next generations might have a better platform to launch their own hopes and dreams...

*The sweet potato ivy-like tops are still thriving, so I'm hoping they're making the most of our shorter  growing season up here, and less numerous days of extreme heat.  Sweet potatoes, I've read,  like it hot.  I'll try to stop and snap some photos when they're eventually unearthed.

*Hope you're having a healthy, happy and prosperous week yourself, too...