The humble potato has the power to bring so much joy.
Somewhere between waking and sleeping on our journey towards the unfathomable deep, there comes a thin moment where we have one foot in the waking world and the other is in that other world where we relinquish conscious control.
Pausing here and straddled between two planets that drive one another like gears, the attentive traveler will notice a narrow door only wide enough to sidle through.
This is the border of sleep, where imagination and reality are braided together, a chasm in the crust of consciousness, venting the hot pumice imagery into the irresistible magma of narrative.
Welcome to episode 51 of Stories from the Borders of Sleep, a semi regular podcast of curious tales from bordersofsleep.com featuring original stories by your host Seymour Jacklin.
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The soundtrack for this week's episode is by Healing Muses and their album Reflections, which as usual is available on magnitude.com so if you are ready to journey with me, then I shall begin the Spudfellow by Seymour Jacklin Jim used to follow his grandfather up the field gathering potatoes.
Grandpa would pull them up and leave them like gold nuggets glowing on the topsoil.
Jim would come behind, pick them up and stow them in a trug that was big enough for a baby to sleep in.
When the trug was about to overflow, he'd haul it to the edge of the field and tip it into a waiting sack.
Jymn struggled when the trug was nearly full and he'd have to set it down every few yards and watch Grandpa's loose limbed mechanical rhythm as he worked on up the line.
Jim's work had rhythm too, as he tramped through the cycles of filling and emptying the trug until he'd lost count of how many times he liked working with Grandpa.
Grandpa treated him like a grown up and didn't talk down to him like most of the other adults, Jim daydreamed that one day there would be a real gold nugget, like lying on the row in his dream.
He would take it to the bank and a big man with a tiny jeweler's loop screwed into his eye would declare it to be genuine and give him a million pounds.
Then he'd buy a bicycle and cycle home.
Jim, are you working today or daydreaming?
Grandpa called.
Jim tripped out of his reverie and looked up the line of freshly turned earth with a zigzag trail of blond potatoes lying on top, freckled with dirt.
Then he looked back to the sack at the edge of the field, calculating if it was worth trekking over there now and emptying the load, or if he could persist for another row until he was close to it again.
Not worth it, he decided, hefting the trug into the crook of his elbow and working on.