Tag Archives: springtime

All the News I Need

01 Sunday May 2016

Posted by in Nature/Environment, Writing

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P1090826

The forest floor is littered with maple flowers.

Look down anywhere and you’ll see the pink with purple specks brightening up the leaf litter.  Waylon and I spent ten minutes in one spot just last week, picking up flowers and placing them on our open palms, counting.  It was only a promise of more maple flowers up ahead that loosened his wonderment enough to move along the trail.

Yesterday I set out with the dogs alone, no toddler slowing my pace to that of constant discovery.  I needed to get into the woods, up the steep old logging road, over the brook and small pool that releases into a fall, across the elevated traverse among ash and maple and beech before I slowed.  I needed to let my legs move so that my mind might begin to move, too—it was my morning for writing, and no words were coming out.

Instead, all I could I hear was Paul Simon in my head, singing The Only Living Boy in New York.

Over and over one line repeated: I get the news I need from the weather report.  I can gather all the news I need from the weather report.

It occurred to me that part of the weather report is in watching the sky, in walking in the woods, in learning how to smell the change of air pressure.  It occurred to me that the weather has been bombarding us with news forever.  Long before satellites and the weather channel, the wind carried information, clouds grew into mountains, maple blooms fell to the ground.

Right now, wind is carrying information, clouds are growing into mountains, maple blooms are falling to the ground.

Right now, a coopers hawk hunts over our field.

Right now, it’s raining and seeds are softening their shells to sprout and the air is moving slow.

It’s all I need to know.

 

What use are memories?

17 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by in Nature/Environment

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frog eggs in the pond

frog eggs in pond, april 30 2015

The frogs are back.

For weeks before they returned, Waylon would pull at me as we passed by the pond and say, “froggies sleepin’?”

“Yep, the froggies are sleeping under the mud,” I’d say, and continue the walk to the greenhouse.

They broke their sleep last Wednesday night; as I turned the lights off and walked upstairs, their croaking bubbled its way through the walls and into our bedroom.  It took me a few moments to make out what it was as I stood still by the window, stretching my ears to their call.  For the first time since we moved into the house, I missed the thin walls of the yurt, how they let all the sounds in.

We are close enough to the pond, though, closer than we were in the yurt, and so even now as I write these words on Sunday morning, windows closed, I hear them: their popping percussion aided by the swinging notes of chickadees and the tinny flitting whistles of robins.

We counted 33 yesterday, legs all splayed out as they floated on the pond’s surface.  Waylon’s counting is sequential up to 10, and then erratic after that, going 15, 18, 16, 17, 19,  and so on, all the way up to 20-10.  He corrects me when I say 30.

I wonder how much he remembers of falling asleep and waking to the springtime concert when we lived in the yurt.  Yesterday Edge asked Waylon if he remembered where he was born.  He replied, in mama’s belly.

“But do you remember where you came out of mama’s belly?” my husband asked, and then answered our son’s stare, “right over there; in the yurt.”

It’s only recently that Waylon has started saying, “member when…” and part of me smiles at his development, and part of me wonders what language is worth when so much of it is spent on the past.

What use does a toddler have for memories?  What use do any of us have?  Sure, there are the necessary elements of learning so we may know how to feed and clothe and shelter ourselves.  The necessary learning to stay alive.

But the frogs are awake now, and there’s no use in dawdling over last week, when we’d stop and talk about their muddy sleep.  The frogs are awake, and Waylon is counting, and there are stones to throw into the pond, and there is mud to play in.

What use are memories when all of this is at hand?  When the sun is warming the water and maple buds are flowering and there is a whole, waking world to be present in.

 

 

The Wild Ones Emerging

08 Friday May 2015

Posted by in Seasons, Wildness

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Coltsfoot was the first to emerge, pushing its dandelion-like yellow blooms up along roadsides and old gravely logging roads.

Then came the peepers in an evening chorus around the pond, and the bubbles of frog eggs floating in the water.

frog eggs in the pond

Just a few days ago, a friend pointed out a splash of white flowers beneath maple trees on the road, bloodroot blooming out of leaf litter in the filtered sun.

And yesterday I noticed a carpet of trout lilies blooming behind the yurt, the yellow petals flexing open, faces slanted down to the earth.

trout lily

The perennial gardens are waking up, too: peppermint and spearmint, peonies, iris, dicentra, yarrow, echinacea, rudbeckia–all coming back, finally, and bringing the last sleeping parts of me back with them, too.

Growing in Alaska

24 Saturday Apr 2010

Posted by in Alaska, Farming, Travel

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Interior Alaska.  Many people have come up in search of gold or work on the oil pipeline.  I’ve come here to garden, and to teach students to do the same.  Before driving to Fairbanks, I spent four days in Anchorage and a night on the Elmendorf Air Force Base with my friend Rick and his wife Megan, neither of whom I’d seen since high school.  We reminisced and laughed over memories, they told me of their three years at a base in Italy, I told them of my travels to Northern Ireland and New Zealand.  When their friends came over, Rick introduced me and said, “She’s going to do some gardening thing in Fairbanks!”  General confusion and a look of slight bewilderment crossed each face at this statement.  Why would you come here to garden?  Do things even grow in Fairbanks?

As it is, things do grow here and all over Alaska.  Hardy greens like kale, and most other brassicas, thrive in Alaska’s planting zone of 2-3, and greenhouses help fruits and veggies that like warmer temperatures get a head start in the spring.  This spring has come early, and we may be able to get the first plantings in by mid-May.

On Friday I spent the morning at Hunter Elementary, where I am the School Garden Supervisor, mapping out rows and getting ideas for garden expansion.  Throughout the week I went into classrooms and started seeds with the kids.  Next week I’ll begin broadforking, loosening up the soil in order to plant potatoes with classes before school lets out for the summer.  I feel blessed to be working at Hunter where the teachers and administration are as excited about the garden as I am, maybe even more!

Each time I walk into the school I am welcomed like the first spring flowers that pop up from the ground.  Elementary students call me “Miss Katie” and give me hugs.  They see me in the garden and run to the fence, yelling, “Miss Katie!  Can we help!” when all I am doing is measuring bed feet and borders; I know that 10 children running in the garden will not help me with this but I say yes and they come sprinting in.  “Remember the number 127,” I tell them, and then ask, “Who wants to help me find my pencil?”  They scatter along the rows, eyes darting, racing to see who will find the pencil that fell out of my pocket.

This summer I’ll be working with students from 6th grade up through high school, teaching them how to seed, transplant, maintain, harvest and sell vegetables at a farm stand and through a CSA, but for now I’m still working on understanding how to plan for a CSA myself.  Susan, my boss at Calypso Farm and Ecology Center, has been trying to teach us the basics of garden planning, but total comprehension won’t come until we actually do it.  She smiles with enthusiasm when she says, “It’ll all fall into place once you get into the garden and start planting!”

I’m excited to start.  And I’m glad I came here to garden.  The earth fascinates me in its ability to give, especially in places one wouldn’t expect.  As the spring unfurls, the snow is transforming into water and the garden soils are thawing.  One of these days I’ll wake to see greenup—the sudden popping of tree buds that happens all at once, bringing a wave of green to the forests—and I’ll know the garden is ready to plant and ready to give once more.