MindSpinner

Of the three tiny apple trees I planted this spring, one, the Enterprise apple tree, miraculously bore a single apple two years ahead of schedule. I’d been watching the fruit mature all along - at least until life became significantly more hectic a couple of weeks ago and the last of the beans turned to leather britches on the vine. Yesterday I found the apple fully ripe and fallen from the branch. I peeled and sliced it and sampled a bite of harvests to come. No bland store-bought apple this. It was juicy and crisp and intensely flavorful - sweet, spicy, and tart all at once. I cannot imagine a better thing to do with a bit of yard than to grow the likes of this.

The orange tent out back
will come down today.
The blue cooler still partly filled
with ice and cans
of Coke and Ale 8
will be emptied.
Diverse sleeping bags
will be wrangled into rolls,
more or less,
and stashed away.

The boy who invited his
best buddies over for a rolicking
midnight Airsoft battle
(and when he was two
strode straight into the roiling surf
of his very first sea)
will be leaving
on Tuesday for eight
months of training.
His Special Forces unit
has already been calling
to see how long
’til he’s ready.
Military Intel people,
so it seems, are needed yesterday.

On the other hand,
last night’s 6mm plastic BBs
will be unearthed in my garden
for the next thousand years.
Green. Blue. White. Yellow.
I swept up the ones
strewn across the driveway
near the car and the wood pallet
stood on end for defense,
but I will not pick up
the ones fired and fallen in the garden
among the carrots and the onions,
the thyme and the slender
green blades of iris.
Not even one.

The process by which we find our way through life intrigues me. Life seems a river that, guided by gravities of heart and need, flows around unyielding obstacles and digs its channels in remaining possibilities, winding at various distances from might-have-beens.

Today, while I write, the marmalade kitten (AKA Orange Stripey Dude) bats and leaps at a strand of leftover yarn tied to the doorknob. No, Orange Stripey Dude didn’t go to the animal shelter. Something came up on the afternoon of July 3, and we didn’t make it to the shelter. On July 4, the shelter was closed. This was fateful. Anybody who can resist the charms of Orange Stripey Dude after 48 hours can be suspected of having a flinty heart. His gender has now been confirmed, he’s been proclaimed healthy, and he’s had his first shots. Like the rest of the fur folk, he is a reliable companion - you feed him, you pet him, and he opts to stick around. He isn’t much good at intelligent conversation, no more than Cat the First or the dogs or the bunnies, so thank heaven for NPR and audiobooks, blogs and the Internet. He does have an appalling amount of playful energy, hence homemade cat toys such as leftover yarn strung from doorknobs. (The leftover yarn means I finished crocheting the string bag as of Sunday, which is a good thing, because work started Monday, and I won’t have time anymore to waste on crocheting unneedful things just because I find the task soothing.)

Outside, vegetables grow in the kitchen garden and in eight raised beds. I’m making plans to expand the effort further and to include more herbs. I’ve even ordered seed for a stand of amaranth. In the past year, besides the vegetables, I’ve added three apple trees, a pecan tree, currants and gooseberries, and I’ve investigated permaculture. Someday, when the teenagers are making their way in the world, food from the backyard will replace much of the food from grocery store. I’ve taken a rather involved look at the matter of how food gets to the grocery store to the table this past year and decided that I don’t want to be at the mercy of all possible threats to food security and affordability.

So, I have too many animals and a yard that’s going to look like a microfarm. All this seems random, but it isn’t. It’s all factored into a knowledge that’s sunk into my bones, “I am on my own.” This is different from saying “I have no friends” or “I have no social life,” for I have these in modest measure. I have too many animals partly because they keep me company. My yard will turn into a microfarm partly because that’s one form of security I can manage while my income erodes against the cost of living. And because being outside planting or weeding does me good when nothing else can. (Alas, mowing affords nothing of the same benefits, though it needs doing this very day. If I have to have a lawn, I should have sheep to nibble it. I wouldn’t have to crank a sheep and push it tediously back and forth on a hot day.)

This spring I watched the roses calculate, after killing frost, answering branch by branch the question, “How far back must I die in order to live?” The dying back seemed to consolidate life by means of retreat to some point from which return would be possible. Sometimes six inches was enough - just the tender new growth that dried to rustling papery skirts drooping from every branch. Sometimes one fork lived and another died. Two roses, the hybrid teas, died back all the way to the ground.

I waited a long time to trim the dead branches from the living. For a long time, I thought there would be nothing.

The Memorial Day Rose sprouted from its forked base in late April and lifts three blooms today on stems a third last year’s height. Rose Lasting Love looked for months to be no more than a thorny gray ladder for a clematis to climb, the one with purple blooms like tall fairy hats. The clematis looked so forlorn and lost I twined it on a trellis. Only yesterday I saw among the tangle of its vines new rose leaves, green tinged with burgundy. Frost had not killed the root of the rose: later this summer there will be blooms.

I am quite finished with school.

Alas, school is not finished with me.  I should be grading papers now, should have been grading them for the past three or four hours, will grade them sometime - perhaps - at gunpoint.  If you’d like to be helpful, you may lock me in a dark dungeon with a single candle, no garden, and no Internet access, and tell me I can’t come out until the entire stack is conscientiously marked.
I’ve puttered in the garden more often than in the house or at the computer this May.  The results are modest but measurable - six raised vegetable garden beds planted, two left to go, a smattering of vegetables slipped in among flowers and herbs in the kitchen garden, a bean support built today of bamboo and twine.

Though it is green, colorful, and alive, the garden is eerily quiet. Wild honeybees are hardly to be found this year. They are not plundering the blackberry blossoms, where the air should vibrate with their buzzing. They do not cling to slender stems of purple lavender.  As closely as I scan the white clover in the front yard, I can find only two.  I’m relieved to see any at all.  The late frost may have taken the honeybees, or the deep cold of February, or Colony Collapse Disorder, whatever that actually is.  Their work among the flowers is left to others - the tiny insects, the occasional bumblebee or wasp.  I wonder how long the population will take to recover, if it does, and what could be done to help.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must light a candle and make my way down to the dungeon.  If I’m not out by morning, please send a cup of water and a crust of bread, and tell me to hurry up because it’s going to be a lovely day ;->.