Les Verts Monts

It's been raining and raining, and it's supposed to rain some more.  Vermont is living up to its original French name:  les verts monts, the green mountains.  Where just a few weeks ago everything was white, everything now is indescribably green--the trees, the grass, the air itself.  There are green reflections on the puddles and on my winter-white skin.  There are green sprouts in my garden and green frogs--not to mention green algae--in my pond.

There is the deep green of the pastures, the black-green of the evergreens, the yellow-green of the trees that come late into leaf, the curly green of rhubarb and kale.  There is such an aquarium feel to the cool, damp atmosphere that I feel I'm swimming rather than walking when I go outside.  And when Bisou comes in from our outings, she is as drenched as if she'd been in a lake instead of a field.

In all this greenness, I am grateful for the Monet-like swaths of dandelions on pastures and lawns, the pink and white of the apple blossoms, and the orange-red of Bisou, running wetly through the tall grass.  And I'm grateful, too, to Federico Garcia Lorca, who, in a land of olive-drab, dreamed a dark green dream:

Verde que te quiero verde.
Verde viento. Verdes ramas.
El barco sobre la mar
y el caballo en la montaña.
Con la sombra en la cintura
ella sueña en su baranda,
verde carne, pelo verde,
con ojos de fría plata.

Rainy Day Grandparenting

Playing checkers.
Playing War.
Watching half an hour (no more!) of cartoons.
Brushing the goats.
Watching the goats go to the bathroom, right where they live.
Reading stories.
Looking out the window.
Looking at Wolfie's teeth.
Watching the pet snails eat lettuce and poop (wow!).
Wondering why Lexi doesn't want to play.
Drinking Virginia Slim's milk.
Praying that the rain will stop.

Spinach In A Gale

It rained all day yesterday, that gentle rain from heaven that was keeping gardeners indoors recovering from their labors. And that is what I would have been happy to do except that I happened to look out the window at the garden and see, to my horror, that the spinach had gotten so big it was starting to look like rhubarb. And some of the leaves were getting those pointy ends that herald the bolting of the crop.

There was nothing for it: I would have to go out and harvest the spinach immediately if I wanted a good supply of vitamin A next winter.

In between showers I marched out with two big baskets and a huge stainless-steel bowl. The grass was soggy, and the wooden boards that constitute the paths between the vegetable beds were slippery. I crouched down and started picking.

You know how spinach leaves are, all crinkly? Every one of those crinkles was full of rainwater, and pretty soon I was drenched up to my elbows. And that is when the wind picked up, heralding a cold front.

It came whistling in from the west, shifted to the north, spiraled west again, then south and east. I tried to position myself between the wind and the basket of spinach, but every time the wind would shift it would blow half the crop out of the basket. I ended up keeping one arm, fingers spread, pressed down on top of the spinach in the basket, and picking with the other.

I eventually made it back into the house, the spinach beds looking suitably diminished. Now I had a mountain of spinach in my hands, to be processed while all its nutritional virtues were still intact.

This is when I wish I had an industrial-size kitchen, with tub-sized sinks, and a half dozen helpers, one to wash, one to drain, one to keep the water boiling. One to keep putting ice in the cooling bowl, one to drain again, one to fill and label the freezer bags and one to take them down to the freezer in the basement. I guess that makes seven. I wish I had seven helpers.

But instead I did it all myself. My mountain of spinach shrank down to ten small freezer bags. Then I went to yoga and spent the entire class breathing “into” my aching back.

Gentle Rain From Heaven

After a string of bright, chilly, windy days, the rain has come to stay for a while, and we gardeners are celebrating.

Not for the obvious reason, however. Sure, we're glad for the perennials just coming into bloom, and for the broccoli and tomato transplants whose baby roots need all the help they can get, and for the water table on which our wells—and everything else—depend.

But the real reason that we gardeners are rejoicing is that it's too wet to work outside. So we're tossing our dirt-encrusted jeans in the laundry, scrubbing the dirt from under our nails, and reacquainting ourselves with the inside of our houses. Reacquainting ourselves with friends as well.

Having applied 30 bags of mulch (weighing about 40 pounds each) to the flower beds in front of the house yesterday, I spent this morning returning e-mails, talking with one friend on the phone, going to lunch with another. We are all as grateful for this spate of rainy days in gardening season as we are for a thaw in January.

Which leads me to conclude, once more, that frequent changes in routine are a very good thing. For me, the lengthening, then shortening days; the peepers giving way to crickets; the planting and the harvesting followed by the shutting down of the outdoors, followed by the season of the wood stove—these are the things that keep the tedium of life at bay.

A place where it's always sunny; where you can go swimming in February and plant tomatoes in March; where the same birds sing and the same flowers bloom year round; the kind of place, in short, where most people would like to live, would do me in.

Give me, instead, a place where I have to look out the window and listen to a ten-minute dissertation by the VPR weatherman before I can figure out what clothes to wear, what kind of boots to put on my feet, and what shape my life will take (frenzied physical activity outdoors? Indoor reflection and philosophizing?) for the next twelve hours.

The natives around here like to say, "if you don't like the weather, just wait five minutes.” Me, I almost always like the weather, and I'm almost always glad that it keeps changing.