Farmers know nothing waits for them, nothing at all. Whatever this is, this life – this world – it is moving all the time. The sun never stood still over Jericho, nor anywhere else. The carpenter bees have finished their boring and the house fascia is safe for another year, or until the woodpeckers come. If you don’t have it planted, most likely, you can’t plant it now. If the potatoes are not dug, they rot. If the garlic is to be put in the ground in October, the soil must be ready in September, or better yet right now. In weak hives, if the excess honey is not taken by the apiarist, it will be taken by the wasps, hornets or honeybee raiders.

The deeper we look into space, the more astounded our gape. I think all our theories of the universe are in flux and that’s a good thing; it means science recognizes new facts when revealed. But here, our marvelous planet still spins green and blue and white, and time brings us to the joyous moments as well as the hard, and the Ellenville Blueberry Festival is one of the most joyous for me. It came up fast and we worked on harvesting and spinning honey most of the week and finished bottling the manna the morning of the event.

Ellenville is on the same road as our house – State Route 52. It’s just that there is a mountain in between. The Shawangunk Mountains separate the Wallkill River Valley from the Roundout River Valley. After the Roundout Valley, westward, Rip Van Winkle slipped away from his wife up into the Catskills. But Ellenville is over the mountain from here, down there in the morning shadow, and the road is steep through Walker Valley where my grandparents and mother are buried, and this is all part of the feeling of the drive. It’s good to drive west in the morning as the sun is behind you and this year the foliage is thick and green and there is no evidence of fires or drought like last year. Just over the crest of the mountain where the road levels briefly under Bear Hill, on the downhill, the overlooks invite the driver to stop and see the city below and hills and clouds of what was once the western frontier, and it was steamy and blue-green in the morning and the air was crisp as cold lemonade. I felt good on the S-curves of the lower slopes and had, against all caution, the truck in neutral. Steaming into the village of odd crosscurrents, I braked and obeyed the signs and found the center where Main Street was closed to all except we vendors setting up our tents and tables and merchandise and messages.

The sun was out. It was a happy bustle, people helpful with pulling open the canopies and with introductions. It is the most hopeful point of the day, the time when some obscure vendors with big dreams can still have those dreams of success, unbroken by the realities of the pending low sales.

To my left was a young businesswoman in her twenties, a graduate of OCCC. After graduation, looking to work, she opened her own fudge company, and between the two of us we had the sweet-tooth market cornered. She makes all her own fudge and came up with a blueberry fudge for the festival. She has her own store in Washingtonville and her mother is her dutiful assistant. We all worked so hard we hardly had time to talk. To my right was a clothing merchant who immediately had me set aside four pounds of honey for her to take at the end of the day. It was for her allergies, and so she took a fall honey and a spring honey to cover all the bases on pollens, and I looked for the jars with the most pollen collected on the top of the honey, like cream rising to the top of a bottle of unhomogenized milk.

I had comb honey and chunk honey on the display table, and I was surprised by the reaction of a number of groups of young people, unrelated one group to the other, who seemed fascinated by their discovery of the honeycomb. After conversing with themselves in the tight way groups of youth converse – pointed, direct, in short phrases, seemingly without drama or slights – and after finding sources of cash from somewhere, they bought the comb honey and I gave them all spoons and they tried the honeycomb and chewed it like the original bubble gum; and after trying it, others in the group found cash too and bought some and ate it in front of me in the middle of the street, like birds on a wire singing. It was delightful to watch.

A dark cloud came over and there was a brief shower sending the crowd scurrying and prompting a flood, from the general crowd, of immediate purchases out of fearful desperation that maybe they were all too late. The sun came back out.

I have few to no reservations about our youth. Yes, their childhoods are profoundly different from our own, and they have their own ways and their own language and experiences we can barely fathom. Yet they are themselves, and each generation has their own cohesion, their own vibration, and they are finding their own vibrant way through the speeding of this flaming life. I love them.