In late February the sunlight grows stronger and the seed of the new growing season seems to soften a crack and germinate in the hibernating heart of the farmer. Like a small animal that rolls over in a deep burrow lined with musty leaves and twigs, stretching itself and blinking with a yawn and a sigh before it remembers what it is in this old world, and what it is like to be up and doing, I find myself lining up the seed packets and marking up calendars with dates to start to Celosia and the Sage…
I can always tell that spring is on its way when the
children get restless and wild to be outside… the increasing daylight is coaxing
them out like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, and we greet peeks of real (squishy)
dirt revealed in the medians of the gravel driveways around these parts with
almost savage enthusiasm. Bits of green moss and watercress bravely waving in
the streams that vein their way through the watershed district that surrounds
our farm receive rhapsodies of admiration. It’s almost incredible to us now, to
think these little growing things will go un-noticed when their cousins begin
their vigorous vying for our attention and exclamation! They are yet another beauty
that only the magic wand of privation grants us the privilege of enjoying.
In the midst of one of those teasing thaws that tickle us into daydreaming about barefoot afternoons on the beach, plucking cherry tomatoes, and gathering big bouquets of Queen Lime zinnias, we are suddenly singing our hearts out: it’s an impromptu aria, conjuring the earth, calling her up off her winter couch, even as the sun rolls back the heavy white down comforter from off her shapely shoulders…
It’s practically pagan, and silly, with no one but the trees
to hear us, and yet it feels as if we were created for no other purpose than
this , to wander a tree-lined path, treading smiling mosses in the median of a
graveled drive, participating with all our anticipating hearts in the thaw, as
if we were given a voice only for this audience-less concert, as if the
desire of the heart to rejoice in the birth of a new year of growth must have
some means of accompanying the finches and chickadees in the canopy above,
throbbing with new sap running, humming with new buds forming, and hence: the stream-of-conscious
opera in the all but forgotten out of the way places that surround our sleeping
fields. I sing like a wild creature, but I find my mind straying to those cultivated
patches of garden that wait for their manuring and their tilling, and the love
of farmer’s hand, clutching dirt covered crumpled-up plans for the rows and
widths of vegetables and flowers and herbs, like a man who remembers how he
loves his homely wife in her kitchen after catching sight of a siren selling
figs in some foreign bazaar ripe with spices and the scent of hookahs, because
of some motion of her arm, reaching up to her basket, very like his rounded
love, reaching for a tea cup swinging on its hook.
One particular day the wind had the whole woods stirring, and our tame little walk transformed into an adventure as whole limbs crashed down in our path before us, and twigs were tossed to the forest floor with a brazen impatience for anything dry and old. My 2-year-old gripped my hand and said: “Mama! The trees are saying “Wake up! Wake up!” That was the first day we felt that winter was being blown away, and the spring was being ushered in like Mary Poppins, all spit and polish, ready to play “tidy up the nursery”.
On the 25th we will celebrate the feast of The
Annunciation. “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you.” In the Song of Songs, the
love poetry refers to a “wind upon the mountains” and a “wind that will blow
upon my garden”. It is hard not to imagine the Blessed Virgin as that garden,
and the wind as the Holy Spirit. The seed that flowers into the new tree of
life is the Christ Child…every spring, the earth seems itself like another song
of songs in honor of the Queen of Heaven. These are the thoughts that cloy as clods
of earth clunk up the muck boots and get tracked through the kitchen and
utility room…
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