MindSpinner

The cold snap, which lasted nearly a week, proved a marked setback in the garden. There will be no peaches this year. My little Pawnee pecan tree, newly planted, shows no signs of leafing out a second time. Two roses are dead - the only hybrid teas - Memorial Day and Lasting Love. Standing over last year’s crimson rose, now a thorny gray fork, I promise the green-leaved clematis I planted to twine among its branches a more reliable support. The three-year-old variegated dogwood seems to have succumbed, along with the “hardy” rosemary I bought a couple of years ago. Other plants struggle to recover. The Weeping Japanese Katsura’s arcing branches have one or two living leaves here and there, as do the red twig dogwoods. Others are in a similar state. I’m going to give the “dead” things a few more weeks before I pull them out, just in case they are still mustering the wherewithal to try again, somewhere deep inside themselves.

I am struck by the lessons the garden offers about timing. Plants gradually hardened by coming winter endure much deeper cold than plants leafing out in spring, kissed back to life by lengthening days and warming sun. Spring’s new growth makes them vulnerable to sudden killing cold. Life, too, can work like this.

My neighbors covered a number of their plants with plastic on the eve before the frost - those would be the neighbors who put out rubber snakes to scare the birds away, as if we had a shortage of real snakes, or as if the rubber ones could terrorize the goldfinch and the robin when real ones obviously do not. I have so many plants, I would not have known to cover the pecan tree but not the new apple trees or the new currants and gooseberries. Instead I watched what lived and what died, and learned what the frost had to teach.

It is the wild things that handle nature best. The stonecrop is about to unfurl sprays of white along the garden path while the native phlox paints blue stars among the last of the daffodils. I think I’ll give the garden over seasons to the wilder things that have resilience scripted into their nature. Cold snaps have always nipped buds and threatened crops. There’s really nothing new about a killing frost in spring. What evolves is my sense of myself in the garden. I am less the artist, less the designer, than the bumbling apprentice, and my teachers are the frost and sun and soil, the yellow leaf and the green one, the rain and the dry spell, the forest’s edge, the birds, the insects, and the cottontails that cavort at dusk, promising to share my lettuces.

The rhododendron bloomed.

This day I will finish up the school yearbook, but for the final batch of proofs. Our last pages are quite late, and we don’t know whether the book will come back to us by the end of the school year. The bottleneck has been the fact that eleven students have had to share three computers to get the work done. The pages these days are laid out on the computer, not by hand, using proprietary software that is, while manageable, definitely subject to improvement. The old cropping tools come out of the cabinet only once in a while, when a parent or a patron supplies a print for an ad. We were OK with the smaller deadlines, but we could not muster pages fast enough for the biggest one. I have spent the better part of spring break completing spreads in hopes of getting the book out. This student and that one have come in to finish a page here and there.

School starts again on Monday, and before Monday, I have to spend several hours working on my classroom. A gutter backed up and flooded the corner where my desk and teaching materials are, substantially damaging the wall, soaking teaching materials and papers. The wall has been repaired and repainted, but stacks of papers, notebooks, and ripply books have been laid out on tables to dry and must be put away or discarded to make room for students. Nevermind all the other things I had put on my list to accomplish over spring break.

I sat down yesterday and talked with the principal about getting two more computers for yearbook and journalism. I’ve been saying all year that we needed more computers. Now I think the point has been made, though largely at my expense.

The daffodils in the yard opened on cue for the first day of spring. This year I will have to enjoy the season in short and measured breaths, as a swimmer takes in air midstroke. Tomorrow I’ve scheduled a generous gulp of sun and dirt and breezes - a day’s work in the garden mulching paths between the new beds and filling the new beds with soil. I won’t get everything done, but I will begin. Somewhere along the line, the notion of finishing slipped beyond the horizon. It will be enough, for now, to begin.

Just a post to say that I am not dead, only busy, and with tasks that do not inspire me to write about them. Nor do they leave me much time to write substantively about anything else. I am cross about this, of course, but the spring-like weather revives me, and thank heaven at least some of the tasks on my list have to be done outdoors. They are not the urgent ones, but I’m doing them, a little at a time anyway, because they make me happy.

As a rite of spring, I have ordered three plants - two red currants and a gooseberry from Starks. I haven’t the faintest idea what either currants or gooseberries taste like; growing them will be something of an adventure.

This is a sequel to my Thanksgiving Day post and will make no sense if read first.

Nothing succeeds like a good night’s sleep followed by a renewed attack on an apparently insoluble problem. I found that, by securing one side of the apparently incorrectly cut piece of wood (called a “jaw”) first, I could then will/force the other side into place and tighten the second bolt. Somebody must have planned for this tight fit. This victory achieved, finishing the worktable/vise/clamp came easily enough, and this morning I have happily been able to clamp and hand saw the 2″ x 2″s that form the corners of the 4′ x 6′ raised beds I am building for next spring. The other lumber has already been cut to size by the able fellows at Lowes, who probably hate to see me coming. Now that I’ve managed this breakthrough, it’s back to the kitchen to prepare our modest day-after-Thanksgiving feast.