Seth and I work well together. In the case of the Convivio Bookworks website or this, our new Convivio Book of Days blog, Seth is the one who designs the whole thing, and then he hands it over to me. But he does have to get things started, and he is the one who actually began this initial posting. His test post included a photo and a few words. The photograph is of our first successful pumpkin harvest in Maine from one of our big gardening years, circa 1998 or so. The words? A caption, of sorts: Johnny loves pumpkins.
He’s right; I do love pumpkins. A couple of years prior to that photo, during my summer book arts internship printing with Brother Arnold Hadd at the Shaker Press at Chosen Land, the Shaker Community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, my days often included tasks outside of the print shop: haying, for instance, or weeding the garden. I loved weeding the pumpkin patch best. Something about those trailing vines, those green leaves, the bees in the blossoms, and of course, the ripening pumpkins themselves, set me off to daydreaming. I’d be there, close to earth and vine, breathing the spiced summer air, thinking, writing in my head. The pumpkin patch, to me, spoke of great possibility. It’s a place that begins with a handful of seeds. Sure, there is soil and water and sunlight and good compost at the heart of the conversion of those seeds into big, beautiful pumpkins… but perhaps a little magic is involved, too. A touch of alchemy: the alchemy of the everyday.
Seth may have just been setting up the initial framework for this blog when he typed his words, but Johnny loves pumpkins is, I think, a great beginning for us. It’s his handful of pumpkin seeds. This project is very much about possibility and the alchemy of the everyday and certainly about the ceremony of the everyday. So let’s keep it at that and together, we’ll see what comes of it.
John