Late Summer Warfare

It’s out there looking at me, waiting for me, but I can’t go in — I cannot bear to walk the walkways pocked with grasses,  the beds of neglect now a party of weeds. The veggies anemic, still alive but pathetic,  once so hopeful and now a sorry lament on a shriveled vine. 

The Beetles of Japan have orgied themselves, while gorging, in an iridescent sex-food holocaust that has left only laces where there should be leaves.   Their numbers are so vast there is nothing to be done - pick them, drown them,  bag in them in rotting sacs that reek like corpse.  They ate the garden again, and so did the slugs, it is wartime in the dream of eden. 

Sunflowers hang their heavy, conquered heads and the weeds are riot of seed. To beat back the forces of growth with blade and hand is the aggressive, energized stroke of spring,  a killing stroke of enduring grind that builds with the heat and mounts like a chariot of Helios oppression in the Late Summer reckoning.  

You turned your back for weeks too long and the elements of consumption,  of a million tiny toothed mouths and a zillion sucking roots, have won.

 It’s yours, you mother fuckers, you can have it, live on all you want ‘till the hard frost cuts you down in the night and tinkles as you brown and wither in an instant. I’ll stand tall in the cold, gaining strength in the snap and chill,  while all you weeds and flying, sliming destroyers shrivel up and die.  

Sure, I know your future generations are living right under my feet as grubs and insidious seed.

But just you wait ‘till next spring, I’m going to rip your world apart, dig double deep beds,  ride up with a truckload of straw to lay down in mile high drifts, I’ll starve you of light and choke you with darkness, next summer, this garden will win.

Stick Season

It is the month of snapping traps, when mice seeking comfort in the kitchen find instead the jaws of death. When cards fall from their berth in the mirror’s edge, released to flap to the floor, face down greetings of cheer.  Chairs creak and crack in the night, grains of wood winding tight, shrinking joint to joint, sending shots of sound through the darkness.

The conquered heads of summer hang high in the forlorn garden, the sun-bright faces withered, the pregnant seeds thrown and eaten, stalks and sepals pointy and dry. Bears and foxes roam on their final rounds, wide territories to manage, each building an inventory of autumn stores. Raptors ride the ridgelines in a true highway in the sky, the updraft holding for miles of flight without a single flap, sharp bodies turned to the angle for perfect lift, effortless propulsion, keeping the trim tight to take them away from the rising cold and towards warmth. 

The green padding on earth has shrunk and dropped, old lanes through the woods appear, borders and corners of softened stone walls snap into place, and the apples of ancient homestead trees hold tight on the tips of the resolute branch, calling the eye. 

It is the season of sticks, when the palettes of grey and brown make mad love to each other and multiply in a million hues of subtlety.  Tapestries of nuance, textures of broadcloth rolled over the hills, visual fields of monotony cloak the sky and ground. 

It is a willful act to not be repulsed and irritated by the withdrawal of splendor.  It was easy to be cradled by summer, sung to while the insects hummed and flowers unfurled in symphonies of color, buoyed high in a sensual embrace weaving in from the horizon’s rich line. The absence of obvious delight angers our spoiled system.  

The bough has broken its hold, the cradle has tipped, the heads of mice are smashed in the traps, eyes bulging under a grotesque hold.  Abundance has withdrawn and left the cards face down on the floor.  We are knees and elbows on the hard ground, wrapped and bundled against the pinching cold, gasping with rejection while the frost creeps up summer’s old blade, birthing small blooms of ice for the eye able to see. 

A Proper Spring

For the past twenty years, the snow has still been thick around the house this time of year. There are storms ahead, more snow will fall, and there will be a long stretch of watching a very slow melt creep across the ground.  In the deepest shadows under the eaves, where the snow is the thickest, we take note of the icy white piles and place bets about when they will shrink to the size of a dinner plate and disappear, someday in June. But there is none of that this year. There is no snow, the ground is already bare, and our old friends the snowbanks never arrived.  Early March has never been the time to rifle through the garage to find the rake again — it’s usually snow shovels and skis right on into April.  

Three weeks ago, the most subtle signs of spring had just begun, high up in the trees. The blush on the willow is the first to show, and it’s just a shade of difference, a luminescent brightening from within. Against the endless stretch of white snow, it is easy to miss. It took me many Vermont winters before I began to notice that even in the deepest, coldest air, the trees were absorbing the light of the sun and beginning to stir. To those who are watching in the crisp, single-digit air, it becomes clear that it is not the temperature, but the minutes of daylight, that set the pace of the seasons. When I inspected the buds on the branches — the lilac, the apple, the forsythia, the magnolia — looking for signs of swelling, there was nothing. The air was warm, but not a bud had budged. All were still wrapped tight in winter’s dark.

On that steamy day at the beginning of March, I found the rake, pulled on my gloves, and began to scratch at the bare ground anyway. The movement of my arms felt familiar and natural, but nothing else did. It was bikini weather, yet the grass was still brown and all living plants still looked completely dead. The sun felt wrong on my skin, the rake felt wrong on the ground, it was a strange, eerie scene. The world had literally changed, nothing was happening the way it used to, and after a few bleak minutes, I put the rake away for another day. 

The seasons usually go like this: first, the snow twirls down, the piles grow higher, and the familiar landscape is completely transformed into a billowy, rolling canvas. Everything outside is soon just a bump in the glistening white canopy that settles down for a long winter stay. The world is gracefully, gratefully, covered over, erased by the snow, tabula rasa. This goes on for months, and snow lovers rejoice with each new storm, each new layer of bright, clean, crystal beauty to round the corners and smooth the edges.

By late March, even the snow lovers will admit they are ready for the melt to begin. The sun stays longer each day and gets a little stronger in the sky, and when the great snow blankets begin to melt, they run away in rivulets across the soft, smooshy ground. March can be cold, but even in the coldest air, the sun at high noon evaporates the snow into vapor, and the frozen layer on the earth is slowly peeled back. Like a slow-motion wave receding, the crumbling walls, little pebbles and bits of sand tinkle down the lacy face into scree piles at the bottom. The grit and ice crumble under the sun, and the things revealed underneath are cold and wet, like something just brought up from the bottom of the ocean. Everything is blinking in the brightness, fizzing with newness, ancient and reborn.

Once most of the snow is gone, but still lingering in the corners, the bubbling, saturated ground firms up under the sun, and it’s time to explore the land anew. It’s also time to pick up the windblown trash, the broken branches, and the many forgotten things from last fall. Walking around the yard is like revisiting an old memory, or a past life. Everything you left behind is still there, just as you left it, but slightly altered. The shapes and colors that were hidden for so long are familiar, yet strange— the garden bench, I remember you! Oh, look, there’s a mug of tea I left outside, the inspirational message still says the same thing. And there’s my favorite towel. How did that get out here? 

Some years, the scale of the cleanup can be a lot to reckon with. The piles of stalks from the garden beds, sawed down in great bundles, are still waiting to be delivered to the compost pile, another project paused in the middle. The snow plow has gouged the lawn and left loads of gravel in the grass. It appears you neglected to clean up after that party around the fire, garden pots froze and broke, leaving you with shards. You secretly wish the snow would come back to throw the covers over the whole mess again. It looked better that way. 

All of the glistening, wet, forgotten things are put away in their proper places, and then, finally, it’s time to sort through the garage to find the rake. We comb the grasses and break the seal of the soil to let the sun and air in, uncovering spots that had been made dead with fallen leaves. Raking is a vigorous rubdown after the long, tight squeeze of winter, like scrubbing a newborn foal with a handful of hay, or a mother’s rough tongue. A nice scratching on the surface says Hello there, time to wake up now, let me see if I can help. 

Three weeks ago, I wasn’t ready for this, and neither was anything else. But today — today was a great day for raking. The temperature and the hours of sunlight have caught up with each other, the equinox is near, there is balance. It is actually spring, and both the calendar and the earth know it. The lilac blooms are swelling, the catkins are out on a few birch trees, and I found yellow witch hazel stars and pussy willow blooming by the roadside.  

I raked and raked today, making little piles across the lawn, revealing the gardens and the walkways, filled with so many thoughts about what to plant where. The future gardens are coming into view, the grass is greening up right before my eyes, and the blades of the two hundred bulbs we planted are standing taller. The sun makes sense today, and all of those bizarre, warm, unsettling and snowless winter weeks are behind us. 

We haven’t earned this spring. It was a confusing winter of color, edges, and ease, and it can be hard to enjoy something you don’t feel you deserve. There isn’t a single snow pile to melt, not even in the darkest corners, and I miss them terribly. But the birds are here and calling for mates, the light is long, the sap is running, and the buds are getting ready to burst. Soon, the earth will be blossoming into a kaleidoscope riot of springtime yes.  

The Winter That Wasn't

It’s too good to be true, it’s so good it must be bad,  it’s another balmy, warm winter day. We walk outside and meet the smells, sounds, and gentle air of spring — it is early February, and the hard hand of winter should be twisting around us, pinching our faces, squeezing our fingertips to numb, slamming us down to the ground with patches of ice. Instead, we have cheerful birdsong, a soothing breeze, and the shmoosh of mud underfoot. I can hear running water in the distance. It is eerie and welcome, disturbing and delightful. This is New England without the pain of winter. It is unnaturally, dangerously delicious.

We come from reticent, stony, struggle-loving stock, and this is an indulgence that cannot be mentioned — there is remarkably little talk about the green grass where there should be snow. Ayup, crazy weather. Five months without long johns, boots without socks, the hat hasn’t seen action for weeks, and our entire system of survival lays dormant in the closet. The ice-scrapers, buckets of salt, tubes of sand, cords of wood, and trusty shovels stand ready and unused. The robins are here, the puddles ripple in the wind, and we are eyeing the soft ground for the first green blades of crocus. We look at each other and shrug, wondering what will become us of now, fearful of too much luxury.

We are saving money and losing money in huge numbers. The driveway has been plowed only once — a boon for the homeowner, a serious hit for the plow guy and his family. Legions of laborers used to swarm out after every storm, climbing to the roofs to clear the eaves, patrolling the neighborhoods with shovels and salt, lacing pathways of safety from the car to the door to the mailbox, making pocket money that was desperately needed. Not this year.

Plow drivers are the kings of the winter highway, steering massive, mastodon rigs that will crush you in your little tin-can car. The smaller, beat-up plows tend to the home front, rattling with rust and rumbling with a low, soothing purr. A Detroit engine with 200,000 plus loves the snow in a familiar driveway. Eager for the deepest snowbanks, it reverses and pushes in again, sweeping and lifting the snow in a cradle of power and control between old friends. We race to the second story when we hear, feel him turn into the driveway, we press to the window to watch the dance from above. But not this year.

This winter, these beautiful rigs are silent, their drivers are idle, and the eager men with roof rakes and shovels have nothing to do and no money to make through this strange, warm winter. Ski areas, and so many service industries, are empty when they need to be full. For heating oil suppliers, cordwood producers, knitters of hats, and makers of mittens, winter is an economic engine that won’t turn over and start. It is disorienting for humans, and all of nature is disrupted. Some populations of animals and plants are ready to explode into the warmth, while others are dwindling. A hard, cold winter is a good thing, it is part of the balance up here. I don't want to think about all that is lost, and the ticks proliferating in the warm winter woods. There is so much more about this winter warmth that we don’t want to think about.

This year, there are no snow-day blizzards with the family stuck inside, soup on the woodstove, knitting, reading, suiting up to go out into the gale to shovel and play. No snow forts dug out of driveway piles, no deep powder to fall into, no silent walks through the forest, following the tracks of animals like music across a perfect score. We miss the diamonds on the snow crust, flashing a million rainbow sparks in the sun. We miss the gripping, bracing air, charging the blood with challenge, filling the body with tingling, fiery life. We love the cold, we need the snow, the patterns of ice creeping through the night to delight us at dawn.

Spring is nice, but only after it has been earned. The icy grip of winter hasn’t crushed us with cold, so we can’t relax into the warmth. We are made of sterner stuff than this. We don’t know what this means, what it foretells, how deep the financial cuts will be, how our character and our futures will be changed. Is this a once-in-a-lifetime experience, or the beginning of the end as we know it? We leave the coat on the hook as we head out the door into another gentle day, wistful and confused, smiling at the sun and the songs of birds, smooshing through the mud but wishing instead for snow.