Environment

S P R I N G I N G F O RWA R D

April is the cruelest month, T. S. Eliot wrote, by which I think he meant

(among other things) that springtime makes people crazy. We expect too

much, the world burgeons with promises it can’t keep, all passion is really

a setup, and we’re doomed to get our hearts broken yet again. I agree, and

would further add: Who cares? Every spring I go there anyway, around

the bend, unconditionally. I’m a soul on ice flung out on a rock in the sun,

where the needles that pierced me begin to melt all as one.

On the new edge of springtime when I stand on the front porch shading my eyes from the weak morning light, sniffing out a tinge of green on

the hill and the scent of yawning earthworms, oh, boy, then! I roll like a

bear out of hibernation. The maple buds glow pink, the forsythia breaks

into its bright yellow aria. These are the days when we can’t keep ourselves indoors around here, any more than we believe what our eyes keep

telling us about the surrounding land, i.e., that it is still a giant mud puddle, now lacking its protective covering of ice. So it comes to pass that one

pair of boots after another run outdoors and come back mud- caked—

more shoes than we even knew we had in the house, proliferating like

wild portobellos in a composty heap by the front door. So what? Noah’s

kids would have felt like this when the fl ood had almost dried up: muddy

boots be hanged. Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful.

I’m nuts.

Our household was a week into high spring fever when Lily and I de-cided it was safe to carry out some of the seedlings we’d started indoors

on homemade shelves under fluorescent bulbs. The idea of eating from

our home ground for a year had moved us to start a grocery store from

seed. We’d been tucking tomatoes into seed flats since January, proceeding on to the leafy greens and broccoli, the eggplants, peppers, okra, and

some seed catalog mysteries we just had to try: rock melons, balloon fl owers! By mid- March our seed- starting shelves were overwhelmed.

Then began the lover’s game we play with that irresistible rascal partner, March weather. He lulls us into trust one day with smiles and sunshine and daytime highs in the sixties, only to smack us down that very

night with a hard freeze. On our farm we have a small unheated greenhouse that serves as a halfway house, a battered- seedling shelter if you

will, where the little greenlings can enjoy the sun but are buffered from

cold nights by five degrees or so. Usually that’s enough of a safety margin.

But then will come a drear night when the radio intones, Lows tonight in

the teens, and we run to carry everything back inside, dashing in the back

door, setting flats all over the table and counters until our kitchen looks

like the gullet and tonsils of a Chia Pet whale.

This is what’s cruel about springtime: no matter how it treats you, you

can’t stop loving it. If the calendar says it’s the first day of spring, it is. Lily

and I had been lured up the garden path, literally, carrying fl ats of broccoli, spinach, and cilantro seedlings to the greenhouse on the bank just

uphill from the house.

The greatest rewards of living in an old farmhouse are the stories and

the gardens, if they’re still intact in any form. We are lucky enough to

have both.