Wobbly

I’m in a wobbly state these days. This, I am told, is normal after hip replacement surgery, but lately I’ve been feeling even more wobbly emotionally than I do physically. My inner weather shifts from placid to stormy countless times during the day. It doesn’t take much to lower my barometric pressure: an unanswered email, one item too many on my to-do list and, above all, the danse macabre of the news cycle, swirling in my consciousness from dawn to dusk. 

I wasn’t always like this. Although I had my ups and downs, I never approached my present weathervane-like state. One variable of course is age. I had always imagined that someday, when I finally grew up, I would attain a sage-like equanimity. So far this fantasy has not come true for me, on the contrary. 

But the principal variable, I believe, is not my age, but the age in which we live. Floods and fires. Afghans clinging to the fuselage of taxiing cargo planes. Haitians being dug out (or not being dug out) of ruins. Americans dying who would have lived if they had been vaccinated. Overflowing ICUs, exhausted doctors and nurses, and a virus that keeps reinventing itself. The uncertainty of what life will look like in a month, or three. Who can stay calm in the middle of this?

Often I tell myself that no generation before us has dealt with threats of this magnitude. And then I try to imagine myself as a Jew in 1940s Germany, or as my father, in hiding from 1936 to 1939, the duration of the Spanish Civil War. Surely the daily fear for their lives, their hunger and deprivation, were worse than what I and the people around me have to put up with. 

But here is the difference: although for us lucky ones the dangers are not immediate, they are planetary. We are the first generation to live day in and day out with the awareness of massive extinctions and colossal disasters across the globe, and the threat of more to come. (Have you noticed how few butterflies are around this summer? I saw a single Monarch at my hyssop yesterday and almost went down on my knees before it.) 

So in my apocalyptic moments, my mood teeters and falls. But then, because I am human and cannot sustain any one emotional state for very long, the phone rings, or I meet a friend, or I find a good book, and I lurch upright again. However, these are merely distractions, and the next newscast, article, or photo plunges me into the depths once more. 

Is this the new normal? And if so, how are we going to get through it? Is there even something beyond the through? I suspect that, for weary Londoners in the middle of the Blitz, it also must have seemed as if their trials would last forever. But then the Americans finally joined the war and made everything better. 

Where, I wonder, are the “Americans” who will come with weapons, K-rations, and chocolates, and get us out of this mess? 

Dogs In The Storm

For years, when people would tell me about their dogs being driven nuts by thunderstorms I felt inwardly superior.  They must be doing something wrong.  Maybe they themselves were scared of storms, and the dogs caught their fear.  Or they made the mistake of petting and comforting the dogs at the first sign of nervousness, thus reinforcing the behavior.  Or maybe they just had wimpy dogs.

None of my dogs had ever been afraid of storms.

Pride, of course, goeth before a fall, and now I have not one but two dogs who are terrified of storms.  I used to have three.

This is how it happened.  My now-deceased German Shepherd, Lexi, as her eyes and ears and courage dimmed in the last year of her life, became afraid storms.  And big, black Wolfie and little, red Bisou, who considered Lexi the final authority on all matters of interest to dogs, decided that she knew something we obviously didn't--namely, that storms, as opposed to, say, porcupines or black bears or speeding cars, were truly dangerous, and the only appropriate response to them was panic.

Now Lexi has gone and left me with two storm wimps on my hands.  Or, more accurately, on my lap.

SinceVermont became a province of Brazil last month, we have had a thunderstorm almost every afternoon.  When Bisou gets that wide-eyed, orphaned-puppy look and tries to sandwich herself between me and the back of the chair, I know the daily storm is on its way.  When she tries to crawl under my shirt, I count the seconds until the first thunderclap.

Wolfie, ever the gentleman, doesn't actually climb on my lap.  Instead he paces, and he pants. Then, sounding exactly like a sack of potatoes, he drops his ninety pounds on the floor and drools on my toes. Then gets up and paces some more.  If the storm is especially severe, he takes refuge under my husband's legs (why not my legs, I wonder?).

I have never been afraid of storms.  In fact I always liked the drama, and the smell of the wet earth, and the sudden merciful cooling of the air.  But that daily panting and pacing and burrowing  are starting to get to me, so that at the first faraway rumble I put down my book, go to the window, sigh with irritation, wonder if we'll lose power, pick up the book again, put it down, worry that this storm will finally uproot the big ash tree behind the house...

Who says we can't learn from our dogs?

Spinach: An Endangered Species

Here's why I think that we may not be eating spinach many more seasons, if things continue the way they are:
 
Spinach seeds have to be planted directly outdoors instead of starting them indoors and then transplanting. That's one of the cardinal rules of gardening.  So every year, while there is still snow on the ground, and often in the middle of a blizzard, I go out and sow spinach seeds in the garden. 

The seeds take a long time to sprout, and the seedlings take forever to grow to harvest size.  I planted spinach at the end of March, and it seems like we only started eating it a couple of weeks ago.  But since then we've had a string of sultry August-like days, and today I had to pick all the spinach and freeze it, because almost every plant had started to bolt.  Spinach is a cool season crop, and goes to seed and becomes inedible when the weather turns hot.  So if you want lots of spinach for fabulous cream soups and yummy quiches in January, you need a nice, long, coolish spring.

The kind of spring I came to Vermont for.  The kind of spring we used to have in Maryland before that state's weather patterns became part of the Deep South..  The kind of spring we seem to be running out of, everywhere.

I expect the lettuce will bolt soon, as well as the mustard greens.  I picked the first head of broccoli to have for dinner tonight, and this too seems premature.  When I lived in Maryland, I used to have to pull up the broccoli plants in June, because the weather was too hot, and the cabbage caterpillars were all over the plants.  But in Vermont, the broccoli kept producing all summer long.  At the rate it's going now, that may not happen this year.

Vermont, I'm afraid, is turning semi-tropical, and this brings me to the topic of bugs, which are growing to semi-tropical size.  Yesterday I saw something large and orange flit by, and I thought it was a Baltimore oriole.  It flitted back, and I realized it was a bird-sized butterfly.  In the garage last night I met a wolf spider that, with its legs extended, was a full three inches in diameter.  As a result, I'm now storing my barn shoes up on a shelf instead of leaving them on the ground.

When the dreaded cave crickets arrive from the South, I'm moving to Alaska.  I hear you can still grow spinach there.

Some Catholic Reflections On An Early Spring

As many of you know, I am a former Catholic--or rather a lapsed Catholic,  since few people ever succeed in ridding themselves completely of Holy Mother Church's hold on their psyches.  I ceased practicing in my twenties, since I couldn't go along with the Church's position on birth control and had been taught that a cafeteria-style Catholicism was worse than no Catholicism at all.  But I can still chant the Credo in latin, and will do so at the drop of a hat.

The imprint goes much deeper than Gregorian chant and the smell of beeswax candles, however.  It is my suppressed Catholicism, for instance, that is responsible for my tendency to imbue everyday happenings with a religious significance.  Take, for instance, this early spring, which has caused maple sugaring to begin a full three weeks ahead of schedule. 

I know many people who glory in this sort of weather, who are grateful to be able to get outdoors and start raking the hay mulch off the flower beds--a task that in normal years they couldn't even begin to think about until April.  I, on the other hand, view this warmth with deep suspicion.  For one thing, we don't deserve it.  We don't deserve it because we haven't earned it by three good months of snow-shoveling, fire-stoking, and long-underwear-wearing.  There have been no blizzards, no cabin fever, and thus none of that bursting out of doors on the first day the thermometer hits 32F to fling spinach seeds on the still snow-covered garden.  The prizes that aren't sacrificed and waited for are hardly worth the winning.  It is by our sufferings in this vale of tears that we earn eternal life, no?

Furthermore, I think this early spring is the first stage of something we have earned:  a severe punishment, in the form of global warming, for our sins against the earth.  Hildegard of Bingen knew what she was talking about, back in the 12th century, when she said:  

Now in the people that were meant to be green there is no more life of any kind. There is only shriveled barrenness. The winds are burdened by the utterly awful stink of evil, selfish goings-on. Thunderstorms menace. The air belches out the filthy uncleanliness of the peoples. The earth should not be injured! The earth must not be destroyed!

To distract myself from these dire thoughts, yesterday I pruned my two little apple trees.  I was shocked, when I took off the first "sucker," to see how much green there was under the bark.  The sap had certainly been running, and I hoped I was not too late with my shears.  But I finished the job anyway, sculpting the trees by cutting away the upright-growing branches and preserving the ones that came off the trunk at a wide angle, and snipping off the skinny little twigs that would get in the way of a thrown cat (if an apple tree has been properly pruned, you should be able to throw a cat through its branches).

And here again I found myself having Catholic thoughts--all this cutting and purifying and inflicting pain (I hope not much) in the hopes of a glorious future harvest reminded me of going to confession, where in exchange for the pain of telling your sins to a stranger you are left feeling cleansed and full of hope.

Speaking of which, as soon as it stops raining, I will plant my spinach, which mundane act will not fail to remind me that by doing my little bit to minimize the "shriveled barrenness" of the earth I will perhaps save my life, and possibly even my soul.

Hibernation Hesitation

Coatless and sockless in the four o'clock dusk, picking kale in the garden, I almost stepped on a woolly bear caterpillar that was crossing my path at a pretty good clip.  By now it should have been curled under a thick padding of leaves, safely tucked against the rigors of winter.

We do a lot of tucking here in the fall.  The hens get a thick bedding of hay to keep their skinny feet warm.  The garden gets a nice duvet of compost.  The young apple trees get hard plastic socks around their trunks to guard against the rabbits.  The climbing roses get a layer of mulch hay around their feet, while the lavender is surrounded by a wall of hay that reaches halfway up the plants.  The rosemary bush and the scented and zonal geraniums have been indoors by a sunny window for weeks.

Vermonters (and Vermonter wannabes such as I) tuck themselves behind massive stacks of wood that will feed the stove until late April.  Every driveway is outlined with four-foot markers warning the snow plows away from the grass.  And the shrub-proud among us (not I) put out A-shaped wooden contraptions to keep their plantings from being dismembered by avalanches dropping from the roof.

In a word, Vermont is tucked and ready for winter.  But, as that 15th-century rake Villon put it, Ou sont les neiges d'antan?  (Where are the snows of yesteryear?).  Sure, we've had a couple of snows already, but they have promptly disappeared in the next day's 60F high.  Reader, it's kind of hot here.

I'm worried about the lavender, sweltering under its thick coat of hay.  I'm worried about the yellow butterflies that flitted across the driveway yesterday, worried about the geese flying in indecisive circles overhead--to stay, to go?  I'm worried about the frogs, who tucked themselves into the gunk at the bottom of the pond on the first cold night, and can be seen clinging to the disintegrating lily pads in the weirdly warm noon sun.  I'm worried about the woolly bears--will they be able to rush to shelter when the real cold suddenly arrives?  And I'm wondering about their cousins, the brown bears.  Are they in their dens by now or are they making sleepy, ill-tempered sorties, hunting for the last berries?  Is it safe to fill the bird feeder?

People in the village store say, "enjoy this weird weather."  Others say, "we're gonna pay for it later."  And I wonder, who are the optimists, who the pessimists?  Me, I hope we do pay for it.  I hope I get to wear my new super-warm-yet-light-as-a-feather winter coat that is hanging in the closet with the tags still attached.  I hope the cold kills the ticks.  I hope a thick coat of snow both shelters my plants and leaches nitrogen into their roots.  I hope the harshness of winter keeps those who would move here for frivolous reasons away.  I hope another season of relative isolation teaches me to endure, to bend with the winds, to find sustenance within myself.

In case you're wondering--that caterpillar in the garden?  It wore a wide brownish-orange belt around its middle:  a sure sign of a mild winter.