hands in the dirt

 

I've been thinking about our garden lately. Last fall, on our final day before the end of the season, I planted eight rows of garlic and shallot bulbs. Now, with two or more feet of snow packed against the dirt, the day we'll pull them up feels pretty far away.

Last weekend Joe went down to the basement to get some potatoes left over from last fall. We thought we'd stored them in a dark and dry enough spot, but when he pulled the paper bag from its hiding place, we found all but a handful had sprouted. Useless. It wasn't just that, but a combination of things, including lack of time and the fact the garden is a 20-minute drive from our house, that inspired Joe to raise the question of not gardening this year. The garden was his idea in the first place, but I'm the one who's fallen in love with the process. Joe loves the results, and the theory behind learning to grow your own food, but he sees it mostly as a slightly enjoyable chore.

Last winter I might've agreed -- we'd had the garden for less than a season, and it was hard work on a very short learning curve. But last weekend, it wasn't up for discussion. I can't wait to have the house overflowing with vegetables in their bulging reds and shiny greens and the way the kitchen smells like fresh, wet dirt after bringing in the first big bag of tomatoes or lettuce or corn. I'm starting to know what I'm doing. 

Last spring, this was our garden plan:

 

This year I want to do things differently. I want to grow fewer things and space them more appropriately; I want to learn a new way of preserving what we grow. I want to learn more about composting, which we do, but certainly not as well as we could. 

The past two years, we were lucky to get seeds in the ground to grow, and we moved blindly from sprout to table, no safety net of prior experience to guide our way. I never thought I'd get excited over seed catalogs. 

Now here we are, moving an inch or two away from being true beginners, toward a slightly more certain center. And when I look outside my window and see a frozen lake and a dull gray sky, nothing makes me happier to imagine than green fields at mid-day and hot sun on your neck and an ache in your muscles that says you've done something good and real.

Moratorium

After returning from a three-day respite to the relatively hot weather of Arizona, I hereby place a moratorium on all weather-related waxing.

I won't complain that we still have many feet of snow on the ground almost halfway through March, nor will I lament the fact that I had to re-box all of the short-sleeve shirts I had unpacked for our trip south. I won't even mention the fact that the reports of more snow this week had me so wracked with disappointment earlier today that I almost accidentally drove my car into a ditch.

Because I'm getting tired of hearing my own self talk about the temperature. I'm tired of the anxious, depressed looks that cross the faces of shoppers when they see the bathing suits and sandals in the window displays of chain stores. I need to reclaim the me that sees this as one big, fun, ice-covered adventure.

Maybe the act of embracing our never-ending winter will increase my fortitude in the face of future adversity. Maybe it's a gift from the gods, allowing me a last-ditch chance to learn to snow-shoe. Maybe it will force me to fill my time reading things other than the updates from the National Weather Service, which, in turn, will make me a more interesting person at dinner parties. Maybe it means my out-of-town friends will stop secretly rolling their eyes whenever we talk on the phone.

Maybe. But if I talk about weather one more time before June, please, somebody start spamming me.

Squirrel

You know it's cold when you need to scrape the ice off the inside of your car windows. That's how cold it's been this week. And last week. And the week before that.

This afternoon I got home from the gym to find a squirrel dying in our front yard. It had managed to climb most of the way up a wooden trellis that stands between our house and the house next door, on its way to some tall tree branches. The squirrel was gray with dark brown speckles on its back, and a thin, droopy tail. It held a light-colored shell of something between its teeth, but its back legs kept giving way, and it lost its balance. To hold onto the trellis, it had to let go of the shell, which meant turning around and climbing back toward the ground. No use climbing all the way up the tree without food.

The squirrel was either injured or partially frozen. I checked the temperature when I later went inside -- it was 14 degrees with a wind chill of 3. At what temperature do squirrels start to suffer?

As soon as it reached the ice-covered ground, it paused, looking defeated, and then it fell over. From the front porch, I gasped. I think I actually clutched at my throat. Since winter started, the squirrels have been acting funny. They've been bolder and braver and a touch desperate, coming within a foot or two of a person, just to get a seed or something. Just after Thanksgiving, a fat one chased me down the sidewalk. I didn't think I could handle finding an actually dead squirrel in the yard, especially not one I had seen in pain while alive.

"Get the shell!" I said out loud. "You can do it!"

The squirrel righted itself and scampered around the base of the trellis, searching for something it could take back up the tree. Its back legs kept buckling and slipping to the side, which, as it walked, made it look sort of like a drunk person trying unsuccessfully to walk in a straight line. It trembled, its front paws especially shaky, and again it tumbled over.

I almost ran inside to tear up the last of the bread that was slowly going stale in our kitchen, but then I gave myself a silent lecture on the dangers of human intervention. "This is what happens in nature in the winter," I told myself, "this is what's supposed to happen."

The squirrel failed to find the shell. Instead it turned to look at the street.

"No!" I shouted. "Don't do it! You won't make it!"

The squirrel didn't listen. Luckily the roads were still bad from two days of winter storms, and the traffic on our street was thin. You know how squirrels leap and scamper? Imagine that, but in excruciatingly slow motion. Each time it landed on its way across the road, I could almost see it wince. This squirrel was making its last stand.

I watched as it reached the driveway across the street, then it paused under a parked car. As I waited to see what it would do next, I thought about all of the dramas that play out in this urban wilderness -- where people and cars and domesticated animals aren't the main players, but the backdrop, a few unnatural predators to avoid. Even here, in the middle of a small city, where concrete, bricks and asphalt far outnumber trees and grass, nature finds ways to take hold.

Our house is in a densely populated neighborhood, with yards the size of postage stamps and only a few feet between buildings. Before we moved in, our house had been vacant for several months. And we soon discovered that nature had started taking over, as if the natural parts (wood beams, wood floors) of this human-made building were being called home. Things -- who knows what -- were living in the walls. Centipedes and spiders had started colonies. Part of me felt bad about cleaning it all out -- the part that liked the idea of nature fighting back and reclaiming what is hers.

The squirrel emerged from under the car and made its way up the driveway. I watched until I could only see the tip of its tail. It was gone. And then I went inside.

7.

The first winter I lived in Maine, my roommate and I didn't own a car. So KL and I walked everywhere -- up the hill to the laundromat, up the hill to work, up the hill to the coffee shop or the diner or the bar.

In the middle of the town where we lived was a very tall bank. On top of the bank was a giant digital sign that alternately flashed the current time and temperature and could be seen for miles around.

One morning in mid-January, KL and I were trudging across a recently plowed sidewalk on our way to Marcy's Diner, where we liked to get egg sandwiches and coffee on Sunday mornings, and because the booths were smacked up against the open kitchen, so it was about the warmest place in town.

On our way, one of us glanced up. "It's SEVEN degrees!" we said.

We had never knowingly experienced seven before. One of us is from Texas (me), and the other is from Maryland.

"No wonder we're freezing," we said.

Ever since then, seven degrees has marked a dividing line for me. Warmer than seven=fine. Colder than seven, and I can no longer distinguish between one temperature and another, so it might as well be -15.

So I grew a little uneasy when Joe woke me up this morning with the following announcement, delivered with a mix of awe and alarm: "It's negative-eight out there!"

I recalled my friend BJ, who grew up in North Dakota and once said it could get so cold that your eyeballs were at risk of freezing. I thought about calling her, and asking if she'd been speaking in hyperbole, or if I should consider purchasing goggles.

But when we went outside, it didn't feel so bad. "This doesn't feel any colder than yesterday," I said, pulling my scarf a little tighter.

And so now I'm reconsidering seven's bad reputation. It wasn't seven's fault that my first Maine winter was borderline miserable. It was the fact that I hadn't yet developed a full appreciation for wool.

I grew to love the constant presence of snow, and the ritual of donning ten layers of clothing just to run to the grocery store, and the sound of ice under my boots. I loved that when it reached 35 degrees, it felt too hot for a winter coat. And I loved the first day of the year when the Time & Temp building flashed 50 degrees: All of sudden, people stripped off their jackets and outer layers to expose their flesh to the elements for the first time in five months. Total liberation.

I think I should call KL and tell her I might be changing my mind. "Seven's not so bad," I'll say. "It's just misunderstood."

Snow

It snowed here over the weekend. Bucketfuls. Three days earlier, Joe emailed me the forecast: "Up to five inches! The high tonight is 14!! 32 on Saturday!!"

I've been getting a lot of emails like this from Joe lately. Until a few months ago, the northernmost place he ever lived was North Carolina. He checks the weather report every hour; the first thing he says to me in the morning is, "What's the temperature outside?"

So we knew well in advance of the storm that we needed to prepare. For example, we bought a shovel. Being Southerners, we also thought we should head to the grocery store with a U-Haul and stock up on necessities, like bread and bottled water and batteries and those weird vegetarian versions of Vienna Sausages.

The store was surprisingly not busy. We must have beat the rush, we said. We smirked as we drove away, pitying the poor people who waited until the last minute. Ha! We could handle this northern-living stuff, no problem.

A couple of days before the snow came, Joe asked his co-workers if they were ready.

"Ready for what?" they said.

"The snow," Joe said.

"What do you mean?" they said. Now they were looking at him as if he'd forgotten to wear pants that morning.

Hmmm, we said to each other later than night, eyeing the bags of candles and canned goods in the corrner.

On Sunday, we woke to find the car and the house and mostly everything else buried under several inches of snow and ice. Joe immediately grabbed the shovel and ran out the front door, while I shouldered the burden and made coffee in my pajamas. When I stepped outside to ferry him a cup of coffee, I found him banging the edge of the shovel into the top of the concrete porch steps. The sound ricocheted off the porch and filled the block with a very annoying clanking. A couple of dogs started howling nearby.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"Getting rid of this ice," Joe said.

"I think we should have bought salt for that," I said.

He paused for a second and looked up, with that look on his face that usually precedes a Very Good Idea.

"I have a very good idea!" he exclaimed. "Listen. There's a box of canning salt in the kitchen, on the bottom shelf. I need you to bring it to me."

Now, canning salt doesn't look a whole lot different than table salt. It's a hint grainier, but still not as coarse as, say, sea salt. And it's definitely not the same thing that the city trucks spread all over the roads to make them drivable.

But I just shrugged, glanced at him suspiciously and then retrieved the box from the kitchen (wondering, on the way, why on earth we owned canning salt in the first place).

Back outside, I handed the box to Joe and then looked around. Across the street, a man with an industrial snow-blower was clearing his driveway. The guys in the street digging out their cars weren't even wearing coats. And now, in front of the whole neighborhood, we were about to use a puny box of kitchen salt to try to remove a 2-inch sheet of ice from our front steps. And everyone would laugh at us, and realize that we have no idea what we're doing.

So, instead of being a Very Good Girlfriend, I went inside and watched from behind the mini blinds.

But, it turned out the canning salt kind of worked.

"Wasn't that a great idea?" Joe asked, when I tentatively stepped back outside. "Now," he said, "let's go do your car."

My car was at the curb, under a big snowdrift. Joe shoveled, and I steered. Or, I sat in the driver's seat and moved the steering wheel, but nothing happened.

"Hit the gas!" he yelled.

"I am!" I yelled back. "I don't think you shoveled it right!" A big mountain of snow was blocking my left tire. Eventually, I got the car to back up at an angle, with its butt smacked against the curb and its front dangling into traffic. But then it wouldn't budge.

"Need some help?" The sound of the voice made me wince, because it belonged to our next-door neighbor. The guy I don't like. The one who oozes smarm and smells like stale cigarettes and stole our parking space when we moved here. Great.

But Joe said, "yes, please!" because, unlike me, Joe is the kind of person who values people for their strengths.

So the guy pushed. And then his wife came out, and she pushed. And then, suddenly, like giving birth, my car popped out of the ice and into the road.

As I drove off in search of a cleared parking space, I almost didn't look back, but then I did. And our neighbors were standing on the sidewalk, waving.