A Brown Christmas

Took the dogs on a solstice walk in the rain yesterday afternoon, and thought of Robert Frost stopping to watch his neighbor's woods fill up with snow on a very different solstice eve.  Instead, my snow was going up in smoke.  I'm afraid we're in for another brown Christmas this year.

I told myself that this heat wave was giving the field mice and the foxes and the deer and the birds who had survived the -18F temperatures a couple of nights ago a chance to recover before the next onslaught.  But I hated to see the snow go.

Where does this obsession with a white Christmas come from, anyway?   Certainly not from Palestine, where December temperatures hover in the 40s and 50s.  It must be solstice-related, like everything else this season.   It makes sense that the winter solstice and the birth of the sun god are felt more keenly by those in the dark, snow-covered regions close to the pole.

Still it's odd that the association of Christmas with snow should have migrated southward, and stuck so firmly.  My childhood Christmases in Barcelona were snow-free, and the popular culture had not yet been transformed by sleigh-riding, ho-ho-hoing invaders.  But the German nuns who were my teachers decorated the classroom with Advent calendars whose little windows were adorned  with pillowy drifts of snow.  And we sang O Tannenbaum in our Spanish-accented German, praising the tree whose green endures even im Winter, wenn es schneit.

But the snow thing wasn't just a phenomenon of my German school.  There was snow in our apartment as well.  Two weeks before Christmas my parents used to set up an enormous Nativity scene.  It went far beyond the stable, and included mountains made of cork, meadows made of moss, trees made of twigs, and a pond made from a mirror.  Over winding, sandy paths a procession of Magi on camels and shepherds on foot, accompanied by cows with calves, goats with kids, ducks with ducklings, and hens with chicks, made its way towards the stable, over which an angel proclaimed his annual Gloria in excelsis.

My father, who though city-born and -bred was reputed to have an especially poetic feel for Nature, was the principal architect of this landscape.  I didn't pay much attention to the creation of the mountains and the meadows, being more interested in the critters and in the tiny, pink Baby Jesus.

But I do remember, when all of first-century Palestine was finally in place in our living room, my father carefully sprinkling a handful of white flour over the cork mountains--the snow without which it wouldn't have really been Christmas, and for which I have since longed every brown Christmas of my life.

What It's Like In Vermont Right Now

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom..."
(Robert Frost, Two Tramps In Mud Time)

I was out planting the cool-season seedlings yesterday--lettuce, broccoli, kale and arugula--and Frost got every single detail right.  First, the sun that made me unzip my jacket;  then, the cloud and the freezing wind that made me zip up again;  and even the bluebird showed up.  He was singing pretty loudly on top of his ash tree, but he didn't excite any flowers to bloom.

The buds on the apple trees are as dry and tight as they were in February, but the chamomile is sprouting between the slate slabs on the patio.  And here is what makes me dizzy with joy:  the garlic is up!  Last fall I finally got brave and planted two 4'x4' beds with nothing but garlic, and now it's sprouting and it's all I can do to keep from breaking off those turgid little scapes and munching on them. 

You must understand, garlic is one of the things I like best in the world.  Once in a restaurant, having first obtained my spouse's permission, I ordered a whole baked head of garlic as my meal, along with some bread.  I loved every bite.  Now it looks like I'll have all the garlic I could possibly want, right outside the back door. 

A word of caution to local friends and neighbors:  come garlic harvest time in mid-summer, you may want to keep a safe distance away from me.

Two Dogs In Mud Time

(My apologies for the title to Robert Frost, who used to live around here.)

Last summer, to keep our dirt driveway from washing away, we had our "driveway guy" cover it with a load of crushed granite.  Now, every time the temperature rises above 30F the dogs return from their walk with their feet, bellies, and tails coated in a kind of gray cement that resists the most vigorous toweling.  I hate to leave them for hours in the garage, so I let them in the house where, for the rest of the day, they shed sticky grit on any parts of the floor and furniture not already covered in a light film of wood stove ash.

I could avoid the driveway by taking the dogs into the woods, but when my CFS is acting up, as it has lately, taking a walk is something  that I know will have repercussions if I force myself do it.  One option is to throw balls with the ball thrower, which enables limp-wristed me to throw with the speed of a major league pitcher.  I could do this in the backyard, where mercifully the winter's crop of dog poop is still covered with snow.

Ball throwing, however, is fraught with conflict.  It is Bisou's favorite thing in the entire world, and  given the chance she would chase balls until her last dying breath.  Wolfie likes to chase balls too,  but even after three courses of antibiotics his anaplasmosis (a tick-borne disease from which may the gods spare your pets) has kept him from regaining his former stamina.  As a result, after half a dozen throws he snatches the ball and refuses to give it up, which means I have to isolate him until he changes his mind.

All this is way too emotional for me, especially on bad CFS days, so I have acquired a soft frisbee, which Wolfie has no trouble giving up.  Bisou, bless her heart, runs after the frisbee too, and lets him catch it, but I can tell that she is longing for the speed and excitement of the ball.  I think she should have something of her own to run after, so I pick up the frisbee plus a weird s-shaped toy that they both like and slosh into the backyard.

I put Bisou on stay and throw the frisbee for Wolfie.  He runs after it, and she breaks and runs after it too.  I put Bisou back on stay and throw the frisbee for Wolfie.  This time she holds the stay, and then I throw the weird toy for her.  Meanwhile Wolfie is ready for me to throw the frisbee again.   This time it goes into the woods.  I praise Bisou for waiting and throw the weird toy for her.  Frisbee, toy, Wolfie, Bisou.  How long do I need to keep doing this?  Wolfie is slowing down and my fingers are freezing from picking up the snowy toys.  But Bisou is barely warmed up.

I do a few more throws.  The familiar cloak of lead is on my shoulders and I know that every minute of additional effort will cost me hours of recovery.   As I take the dogs into the garage to dry them off, Bisou sees the ball thrower hanging near the door and jumps up, trying to knock it down.  There is nothing she would like more than a solid hour or two of running after that ball.

I pick up each of Wolfie's saucer-size paws and dry them while he moans his doleful moan.   I call Bisou away from the ball thrower and swaddle her with the big towel.  Despite her disappointment, her tail wags and wags.  Inside, the minute I stretch out on the sofa she jumps up and reclines on top of me.  Her ears spread out moth-like on my chest, she looks into my face, and in her orangey-brown eyes I see perfect happiness.

Southern Transplants

"You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March."  (Robert Frost, "Two Tramps In Mud Time")

Frost would be a neighbor if he were still alive, and he knew our weather well. 

When a friend and I drove almost an hour to the nearest Home Depot a week ago, a cloud had come over the sunlit arch and a wind was raging off the frozen peaks, and it definitely felt like March. 

The nurseries around here don't even open until the beginning of May.  But my friend and I were looking for early vegetable transplants--crops that will withstand almost anything, such as lettuce, broccoli, and kale--and she knew that Home Depot sells these plants before anybody else.

We drove up in a freezing gale and there they were, on the bare parking lot, racks and racks of baby plants.  The cool-season veggies huddled in their plastic pots and did their best to survive.  But the sad legions of young tomatoes, peppers and eggplants drooped and blackened and perished under the sleet.  What were these semi-tropical imports doing in a Vermont near-blizzard?  Even the most novice flatlander knows that you don't even think about putting out tomatoes until Memorial Day.

My friend and I loaded our carts with flats of blizzard-worthy transplants, and rushed shivering inside the store to check out, past banks of orchids and racks of organic seeds.  On the way out to the car, we spread our coats over the little plants to keep them warm.

As soon as the gale ceased, I put my veggies in the ground.  Buttercrunch and red-leaf lettuce, Packman broccoli, curly kale--just your run-of-the-mill cool-season standbys.  As I tucked each fragile plantlet into the wet ground, I mumbled a little valedictory, "Live well and prosper;  root deep and flourish," and so on.  If you were sticking infant plantlets into the half-frozen dirt and leaving them there to try their luck overnight, you'd be whispering encouragements too.

I was halfway through my transplanting when I noticed a label on the seedling containers.  It said "Union Springs, Alabama."  That is where my lettuce, broccoli and kale had come from, a semi-tropical land where spring was old news, mockingbirds were in full cry, dogwoods and azaleas were beginning to brown at the edges, and it was past time to set out peppers, tomatoes, and eggplants.

What was Home Depot thinking of?  Do they really have a single date on which, oblivious to local temperatures, they blanket the nation with vegetable transplants, from Florida to Alaska and Maine to California?  Does the hope that somebody in Vermont will buy those dead tomato plants justify the investment in shipping them there?

So much for my "localvore" commitment.  A couple of weeks from now, with every crunch of my early salads I will remember Union Springs, Alabama, a settlement on land extorted from the Creek Indians, a town whose name has nothing to do with the fight against slavery, where vegetables are grown for export to near-arctic zones.

Can It Really Be...Spring?

You remember what Robert Frost says about April:

"You know how it is with an April day....
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March."

And here we are just at the beginning of March. But who can resist thinking it's spring? The sun is warm. The snow, softer underfoot each morning. And the chickadees are sounding like they really mean it.

The dogs are going crazy with the new scents, and I am going crazy with new projects. Work on the wattle fence continues. So far four person hours (me: three; spouse: one) have not quite finished one of seven fence panels. But I am not discouraged. Already the dwindling snow makes reaching the stick piles in the woods easier. By summer's end, we'll have a real wattle fence obscuring our prosaic wire fence.

This morning, we had a "pond man" look over our land for places to build a natural pond. It was a little like having your child tested for an exclusive kindergarten. I showed him the four places on our property that stay wet most of the year, places where there might be a spring that would magically flow into and keep alive a pond and its denizens. He took one look and shook his head. The water on our land, he said, was "nuisance water," nothing abundant or fast-flowing enough to nourish a real pond.

We trudged back to the house, crestfallen. A place needs water, I've always felt, to be alive. I said this to the pond man-- who builds ten-acre ponds for New York millionaires who want to relax in Vermont--and he conceded that we might be able to have a "garden pond." By garden pond he means something artificial, something filled with a garden hose. Something with a pump and a liner and god-knows-what-else.

He gave us the name of a garden-pond landscaper, who would advise us on the placement and maintenance of the pond, and which he--the pond man--would scoop out with his big machines in a morning's time, and which I would maintain, clean and aerate for the rest of my life.

But I would have water, frogs, salamanders, and even fish, and who can put a price on that?