LOCAL VIEW –Flower Snow–

I’ve waited a long time to play the part, so I sort of like being a grumpy, yet wise, old farmer. Not that I didn’t try it when younger.

One of my favorite stories involves a time I was a younger gardener in 1990, and advised a spring-feverish older and wiser lady (from Virginia) that it might be unwise, even though early-April temperatures set records and hit ninety, to plant tomatoes in April in New Hampshire. A week later she called me in, to serve me hot tea on a heated porch full of hothouse blooms, from where I worked out drenched in her rose garden in a cold rain mixed with wet snow. The kindly old woman bleakly looked out the window as she handed me my wonderful tea, and said three wonderful words: “You were right.”

But that small victory lacked the quality of grumpiness necessary to play the part of an elder. After all, she was my elder. I had to keep my eyebrows up and smile, and not call her a durned fool, and only “suggest” it was unwise to plant tomatoes. It lacked the full joy of unleashed grumpiness.

Old age may limit me in other respects, but it allows me great freedom in terms of grumpiness. It is sort of fun to scare younger people who are in fact bigger and stronger, or even smaller and stronger, but the smallest see right through my grouchiness to the twinkle in my eyes. When I grump they often laugh. At my Childcare I often grumble something like, “Do I look like some sort of couch? My mother didn’t raise me to be a couch!” This doesn’t phase the kids a bit, as they crowd around to view pictures in a book during story-time, pressing in from all sides and even perching on my shoulders like a pirate’s parrots.

I really think it is wrong to expect children to pass any sort of pre-kindergarten “tests”, or to try to grade them and place them on “levels of development”. They are what they are. Many great men were amazingly “slow” in certain respects. Thomas Edison couldn’t talk until he was four. One American president was still illiterate at age twelve. And Winston Churchill never did learn to be respectful. With children aged three I think it is best to simply expose them to lots, and allow them to absorb what absorbs.

My “curriculum”, if it can be called that, is merely whatever strikes me as noteworthy in our landscape, or whatever work I am doing to operate our toy farm. In early April one “subject” of my “curriculum” is the first flowers, which appear on the hardiest trees. Some are just dull colors from a distance, but intricate beauty, up close.

For example, the short, shrub-like willow called “glaucous willow”, (a real pain if it grows near your drains or leech field due to its webbing, clogging roots, but perhaps useful as a substitute for aspirin), has a moment of glory in the early spring when it forms catkins that look like small, gray, furry tail-tips, or perhaps rabbit’s feet, called “pussy willows”. As a small boy in the 1950’s I recall teachers bringing these fur-tipped twigs into classroom as proof winter wouldn’t last forever, in early March (in Massachusetts). However the true beauty and glory often goes unnoticed, and occurs when the male catkins produce their pollen. The beauty is something to sneeze at:

I like to show such things to small children, simply to see if they are the slightest bit fascinated. Some find dinosaurs far more interesting, even though dinosaurs are extinct and pussy willows are not.

OK. Maybe boys aren’t interested in pussy willows. How about the intricate, tiny blooms of swamp maples?

I guess not, in the case of this small boy.

OK then, how about a small girl?

If we were allowed to be scientific any more, we might hypothesize that the above suggests that small girls are different from small boys. However that would be sexist, so I will not suggest such a hypothesis. I certainly will never suggest small girls are superior. Nor will I suggest they are more English than French, for it is the English gentlemen who fussed about flower-gardens and poetry, as the French fussed about wine, women and gluttony (back in Victorian times.) God forbid!

Back in Victorian times the French and English were allowed to differ, without it being seen as proof they were fascists, and hated the bland conformity of Globalism. The English allowed their children to run around naked on beaches even in the 1940’s, which the French found barbaric, as their children wore suits. The French also considered African woman barbaric, and asked African women not to go topless in sweltering African heat, and instead to wear blouses. The Africans complied, but then noticed the French women promptly started going topless on the French Riviera. It is little wonder to me Africans decided enough was enough, and all the French colonies insisted they be allowed to differ, which involved declaring independence at the same time (1960).

Globalists seem to feel all people in all places should march the same way in lockstep, but to me history seems to show nations and states and neighborhoods and families and even individuals are unique and each have a fingerprint unlike any other. God made people different for reasons all His own, and I prefer to avoid challenging God. I’ll make a lousy Globalist. I certainly don’t attempt to make the children at my Childcare walk in lockstep.

In any case, I’ve lived long enough to know the white things that fall in the spring in April in New Hampshire are unlikely to be cherry blossom petals. If I was ridiculous, and demanded all the small children pay attention, and focus on blossoms, blossoms, and nothing but blossoms, they would not have to rebel and declare their independence from blossoms, for the weather would be anti-blossom for them.

At this point the the Globalists will raise a predictable hue and cry about unpredictable weather an old grouch like me predicted. I still have a boyhood diary, (I think from 1964), describing an April snowstorm south of here, just west of Boston. Yet the Fake News states recent snow is proof Global Warming is upon us, (though snow is not warming). If I suggest otherwise, I get banned from Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. Is it any wonder I am grumpy? These young High-tech whippersnappers are suppose to respect their elders, not censor them. But younger kids are kinder. They remembered I grouched we shouldn’t plant tomatoes and should only plant peas. One five-year-old looked at me after the late snow and wondered, “How’d you know it would snow again?” I grouched, “I didn’t know it. Some years it doesn’t. But most years it does.” But it did seem nice that, even if Globalists don’t respect me, a certain five-year-old does.

But the snow was murder to remove from the entrance of the Childcare. Mid April sunshine is as powerful as late August sunshine, when people sunbathe on beaches, and snow turns into slush which is too heavy for snow blowers to handle. I faced resorting to a primitive thing called “a shovel”, because some young mothers have removed their snow tires from their cars and boots from their feet, and arrive in optimistic ankle-high sneakers.

I only shoveled the lead-like snow from a few strategic places, but that was enough to cripple me. I figured it was an opportunity to die with my boots on, but I was unfortunate and didn’t drop dead, and instead lived on to creak groaning from my bed the next day. I was so grumpy I needed an aspirin, coffee, and the cure called “composing”.

I stir first coffee, hoping it will stir
My sense of humor, as I look outside
At a tangerine sunrise and say, “Brr.”
A half-foot of ermine is draped to hide
The slender shoulders of spring. The snow lies
Like white lies. It will fade like last night’s dreams.
The spring birds know it, and fill the dawn’s skies
With an unsnowy chorus. To me it seems
They sing to a One Spring that is lasting.
All else is passing. Nothing gold can stay.
Dawn sinks down to day. Prayer and fasting
Understands we gain by taking away.
These brief April snows are like all our woes:
Shadows that pass as a Lasting Light grows. 

My boyhood diary from 1964 marvels how swiftly the eight inches of snow vanished, with very brief entries: “Sunny, only four inches left;” “Sunny, only two inches left;” and “Warm; snow all gone but a few places.” I hope this legalizes my telling the kids at the Childcare, “It will all be gone in a twinkling”, although I’m sure certain Globalists would disapprove. Officially, in 1964 snow melted swiftly because it was April and the sun was as high as it is in August, but now it melts swiftly due to Carbon Footprints.

Still, as it all melted I found reason to be grumpy. I pity the poor devastated daffodils. They are native to the north shore of the Mediterranean, where they are born to spring up and wave in warm breezes, perpetually perky (until they become perky seedpods).

It is cruel to transplant such southern bulbs to New Hampshire, where they spring up and and are allowed to be perky for a day or two or three or four, before being buried by heavy, wet snow. Year after year the snow melts to reveal devastated Daffodils discouraged and drooping. And this year was no different.

At this point I likely should write a sonnet about how outsiders need to adapt and evolve when they are aliens to the environment they are transplanted into. Englishmen need to adapt to France and Frenchmen to England. Globalists need to adapt to everybody, rather than asking everyone to adapt to them. But I’ve been there and done that. Check out my sonnet on daffodils, from a couple of years back. (I leave it up to you to conduct the search; it would be vain of me to link to my own sonnet.)

Now I am older and wiser, and basically what I have learned is ancient and not new. It is why we should respect our elders, and why it was wrong for my generation to adopt the motto, “Don’t trust anyone over thirty.” (I think Timothy Leary yammered that idiotic motto when he was forty-four.)

As the the snow melted I saw something besides the depressingly drooping daffodils. It was hopeful. Can you see it in these pictures? (Hint: As the snow first fell the turf was burned brown by last fall’s drought, January’s snowless flash-freeze’s wind-burn, and this spring’s drought.)

We waited long for the iron sod to thaw,
And so it seems a cruel joke that cold snow
Buries the softened pasture, yet the crow’s caw
Sounds happy; not the croak of weighted woe
You’d expect. A drenched dove softly coos
Love’s questions. A wet robin rejoices.
Not a single bird is singing the blues.
From whence comes the joy in all these voices?
Even the gruff old farmer smiles, with eyes
Full of mischief. He growls, “Why the long face?
Don’t you know this snow wears blessing’s disguise?
Beneath white, brown grass greens. It is a case
Where snow gets called, “Poor Man’s Fertilizer.”
Spring’s here, even if fools can’t recognize her.

LOCAL VIEW –2017 Boston Blizzard–Winter’s Revenge (With post-storm update)

In order to fully comprehend the irony adopted by New Englanders, its important to understand the weather has been attempting to play us for chumps, with many signs of an early spring.  A couple February storms had given us a quick three feet of powder snow, but then mild breezes swept north and the snow vanished with amazing speed. Signs of an early spring were everywhere. The pussy willows budded (wearing warm coats, which shows you they, at least, are not fooled by the weather).

Mosses greened on the forest floor:

And, of course, we had a hard time keeping coats on the kids, at our Childcare. Even when they sort of kept them on, they seemed to think they served better as sails in the warm gales from the south.

The sap was running so fast in the maples the sugar-makers furrowed their brows with worry that it would be a bad year, with the run of sap over-and-done in a flash, and I was amazed by how quickly the ice vanished from ponds.

Usually in late February we are still tromping across the ice, and it is March first when I start to be very careful, because strong spring sunshine has a way of thinning ice even when it is below freezing. (I think the ice may be like the roof of a greenhouse, and warms the water just beneath.) This year I didn’t worry about that, and instead had to keep an eye out for kids falling in at the edge. There is something irresistible about water,  to children in the spring.

And even if they don’t fall in, children can find ways to get very wet.

But this was February, and old, cantankerous anachronisms like myself are not fooled. We know March comes in like a lion.

The cold front that came was fascinating to me, for it was very dry on both sides of the front, so there was no line of showers or thunderstorms. However I did notice the sky, which had been perfectly blue, suddenly had a few small cumulus to the north, coming south fairly rapidly. I was herding a small gang of 6-9 year-olds out to the bus stop, and the sky was so fascinating I was unimpressed by a drama occurring between a boy and girl right in front of me.

The “official rules” state one cannot “save” their place in line with a backpack, but one girl was seeing if she could break the rules, and the boy objected. Rather than seeking me (as I am judge and jury) he booted her backpack about fifteen yards away, which breaks another “official rule.” The girl then flopped on the ground and sobbed, achieving a level of decibels that might make a jet airplane cower. The boy folded his arms and sneered at her. Rather than giving the children any attention, I pointed at the sky and exclaimed, “Will you look at that!”

The other seven children were shrugging and rolling their eyes, for the drama was everyday. Perhaps that is why I was giving it so little attention. No matter how much I arbitrate, that boy and that girl always seem to enact the same drama. However the young girl was having none of it. She was bound to get my attention by hook or by crook, and was working herself up into a hysteria, as the boy just tugged the brim of his baseball cap down over his eyebrows and looked all the more ruthless. I pointed off at the horizon. “Look! Entire trees are swaying. Big wind is coming!”

I have a reputation for attempting to deal with some petty squabbles with distractions. (I basically change the subject.) Perhaps this explains why absolutely no one payed any attention, as a roaring noise approached. The thaw had uncovered the unraked leaves in the pasture…

And suddenly the leaves stirred and then swirled up like a vast dust devil and came charging towards us. “Here it comes!” I shouted, and then we were hit by a blast of wind I would guess was around 70 miles an hour. The seven children who were onlookers all screamed for the sheer joy of screaming, the hysterical girl became owl-eyed and silent for roughly a second, before starting anew, and the tough boy burst into tears, for his favorite baseball cap took off for Europe. Meanwhile a mother was just arriving with her five-year-old, and looked around at all the screaming and sobbing midst swirling leaves with deep concern, as her child looked about with a sleepy expression, and then smiled in approval. I just shrugged and said, “Don’t worry. It goes with the territory”, and then went to retrieve the boy’s hat from across the street, as the bus came lumbering down the road. Roughly fifty seconds later the wind was dying down, and the noise was the bus driver’s problem, and peace returned. However I could feel the difference in the air. By afternoon flurries were dusting the landscape, and the mud I had told the children to stay out of was becoming hard as iron.

March had definitely come in like a lion. The expression that is used in many lands, “If you don’t like the weather wait a minute” is said to have originated in New England (when Mark Twain lived here) but everyone else says it originated in their neighborhood. I don’t want to start any fights, so I’ll just quote what Mark Twain actually wrote:

“I reverently believe that the Maker who made us all makes everything in New England but the weather. I don’t know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerk’s factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don’t get it.

There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger’s admiration — and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season.

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four-and-twenty hours. It was I that made the fame and fortune of that man that had that marvelous collection of weather on exhibition at the Centennial, that so astounded the foreigners. He was going to travel all over the world and get specimens from all the climes. I said, “Don’t you do it; you come to New England on a favorable spring day.” I told him what we could do in the way of style, variety, and quantity. Well, he came and he made his collection in four days. As to variety, why, he confessed that he got hundreds of kinds of weather that he had never heard of before. And as to quantity — well, after he had picked out and discarded all that was blemished in any way, he not only had weather enough, but weather to spare; weather to hire out; weather to sell; to deposit; weather to invest; weather to give to the poor.”

As an old grouch I began warning people to keep their guard up as soon as this winter had a nice spell in January. Then I looked very smug when we got three feet of snow in early February. Then, when that melted, I pouted only a little while, before I remembered the winter of 1887-1888 was remarkably mild and snowless, before THE blizzard of 1888 struck on March 11, and lasted until the 14th. New York City got four feet.

A Buried City: The Blizzard of 1888

It is always good to have some history, if you want to be a pessimistic old grouch, and spoil another’s good day. However it is quite another thing to actually predict when such a storm will happen. Here I must be humble and state I bow before the ability of some meteorologists, especially Joe Bastardi and Joe D’Aleo, who gave me a heads-up over a week ago on their Weatherbell Site, when the computer models were still waffling with a wide variety of possible solutions.

I know just enough about meteorology to know how many things can go wrong with a forecast for a storm. I have suffered considerable agony over such forecasts, for when I was young a storm was a gift from heaven, freeing me from the purgatory of school and allowing the sheer paradise of play. My opinion of the white stuff has considerably altered since then, but I still recall the shamefaced TV weathermen explaining why certain storms of my boyhood failed to manifest. They could veer out to sea, or they could “elongate” and become two or three weak storms rather becoming a single gale, or, worst of all, they could hook inland and turn the snow to pouring rain.

A lot of things have to happen right, but when they happen they can happen fast. I recall reading a description of the blizzard of 1888 from the perspective of fishermen, (I can’t offer a link, because I have never found that article again), and apparently even the sailors were fooled. The sail-powered Long Island fleet was trying to sneak a trip in, on a balmy spring day, and suddenly the sky swiftly grew black and they heard thunder, and it was a battle to get back to shore, and not every boat made it.

This abrupt development of a storm (not a lone thunderstorm but a gale many hundreds of miles across) is dubbed “bombogenesis” by meteorologists, and while the word has not yet been accepted by Webster’s Dictionary, it does express the explosive nature of the development. Joseph D’Aleo is an expert on how it occurs, and to simplify his excellent explanations, (found on his Weatherbell site), what occurs is that a “lid” which has been holding ocean-warmed air down, and keeping it from rising, is abruptly removed as a high pressure’s descending air moves away. Then the uplift is further enhanced by one or two jet-streams.

One fascinating thing about jet streams is that they don’t merely move in a straight line, but corkscrew in a clockwise manner at the front and a counter-clockwise manner to the rear (facing forward.)  Therefore if the back of a departing jet lines up correctly with the front  of an arriving jet, the uplift can be extreme, and storms go from having a lid on them to having every encouragement to explode upwards.

What amazes me is the ability some meteorologists have to see when this “might” occur, days in advance. I think meteorologists deserve far more credit than they get, for giving us fair warning. Everyone is eager to make them a laughing stock when they are wrong, but they sometimes are right, and when they are right they deserve thanks, because, to be honest, I doubt we’d have a clue these storms were coming without them.

I like to test myself.  I spend a lot of time outside, and like to see if I can tell when a storm is coming, by only using what I can gauge with my own eyes. I saw very little that clued me in this past week. Not even my goats seemed to be wary.  Yesterday morning there was a weak low down in the Gulf of Mexico, and a small storm rolling across the Great Pains, and a “lid” of high pressure off the east coast.

The radar showed some snow over the midwest, but no sign of a bomb to the east and only a few sprinkles of rain in the Gulf.

We’d been experiencing bitter cold:  -2° on Sunday morning and 3° on Monday morning (-19° and -16° Celsius) with Sunday’s bitter winds giving way to Monday’s calm. Rather than falling the pressure kept rising, to 30.17 at noon on Monday. High clouds made the skies gray around noon on Monday, but then it cleared off. I joked it was a gorgeous day, and people were foolish to be rushing about, but they continued. The stores were crowded with people stocking up, though there was no sign of a storm. In fact it was the dull sort of day worthy of one E.B.Webster’s “Life’s Darkest Moments” cartoons.

I was able to salvage some of the afternoon by allowing the older boys (8 years old) to start a fire on their own, and then showing them tricks to success when they failed.

However the future still looked dull, though word came school had been cancelled at the public schools, the following day. (Our childcare has never been closed.) Then the evening map showed some signs the northern and southern lows were “phasing”

And the radar showed the “lid” was coming off at the coast, but it looked like mostly rain.

Still, the moon was bright, and the barometer was high, only slightly falling, 30.15 at 7:45 PM and 30.11 at midnight.

Then, this morning, the storm had appeared on the coast, with the barometer starting to fall more swiftly to 29.98, and light snow falling outside.

The rain had changed to snow as it pushed north, and after bottoming out at 17° my thermometer was refusing to rise.  It looks like bombogenesis for certain.

Update.  Only one boy showed up at the Childcare. Everyone is hunkering down, as the forecast is ominous for the afternoon, with gusts to 60 mph and perhaps some freezing rain briefly mixing in to break branches and perhaps knock out our power, in which case I guess I won’t update, (Ha ha).

Barometer is falling rapidly to 29.65, and temperature has nudged up to 19°. (-7° Celsius)

Snow is moderate. We have 4 inches. The real heavy stuff is not far to our south.

Update: 1:41 PM  Heavy snow and windy. — 23° — 29.38 and falling rapidly.

Update 3:30 PM  Heavy snow and windy — 23° — 29.16 and falling rapidly. Snow may slack off as dry slot pushes north from south of us.

Update: 4:08 —24° — 29.06  Windy but snow slacking off. Now it is fine, sifting flakes penetrating chinks of clothing on a strong wind.  No way am I heading out to clean-up quite yet, but I can take a picture out my front window.

5:00  –24°–  –28.98 — No snow shows over us on radar, but the fine stuff is still falling. The wind is going to make clean-up problematic, as places will drift back in. In fact, by raising walls of snow either side of a walkway I may merely make a deeper place to drift in. Therefore perhaps its wiser to stay indoors?

6:07 PM  –24°– –28.86– Dry slot over us on radar but steady light snow falling

9:50 PM Clean-up done at childcare. Snow was not light and fluffy. It was starchy and fairly heavy. Hard to gauge depth, due to drifting. I’d guess 16 inches.  Wind slacked off, with occasional big gusts. Snow was fine and didn’t show on radar, but in the past half hour big flakes began falling, and abruptly appeared on the radar.  Barometer 28.88 and steady. Temperature 23° (-5° Celsius) .

Update:  1:00 AM  –18°– –28.99–Still some light snow

7:00 AM 9° — 29.13 —  Blue skies we had about another inch, but lots of drifting.

POST-STORM UPDATE 

11:00 AM  Sunny 19°; Barometer 29.15 and steady. Winds surprisingly light, considering how tight the isobars look on the map. Backlash snows well to our west over New York State.

I had to do more clean-up due to drifting, and also due to the fact State Law wants all exits clear. (I think it is so Child Care Professionals can escape the building when the kids are about to drive them bonkers, but I could be wrong about that.) There was a two-hour-delay, so the older children got to stay with us longer before the bus came. I tried to look appropriately sad about leaving the din to go out into the gorgeous sunshine, but my frown was upside down.

The snow was stiff and starchy and the snowblower has only five blades working because a rock broke a sheer-pin on the sixth, so the blower crept through the deep snow with exasperating slowness. I’d say it moved at around a yard a minute.

There were some emergencies that couldn’t wait for a path to be cleared. There was no heat in the childcare, and I assumed the air-inlet was blocked by snow, and that I needed to trudge through the drifts. (Inlet just beyond blocked exit).

I was able to clean the inlet with my pinkie finger, and saved the day. This is the fourth time I’ve been a hero with a minimum of effort. Ice was starting to skim the upstairs toilet, but I realized the upstairs heat had been accidentally turned off, so I fixed that problem by turning on the heat. Then the water pressure was low, and I became aware a pipe had frozen and burst because a window had blown out in the basement of the old farmhouse, which seemed major, but I fixed the window by picking it up from the floor (it had six panes and not one broke), and jamming it back where it belonged, and then the broken pipe turned out to be a side-line leading to an outdoor spigot, so I simply turned a faucet handle and shut off that line (to be fixed when the weather was warmer), and just like that I’m a hero again.

Then I could get back to clearing the exits. Unfortunately the blower only clears snow two feet deep, which is only enough for a dog door in some exits.

I was thinking of telling my wife that in an emergency people could crawl, but after further consideration I broke down and used an old fashioned shovel. I’m still alive.

Now all eyes are looking to the Canadian prairies. An Alberta Clipper is expected to slide down from there over the next few days, and again there may be bombogenesis on the coast.  Never a dull moment.

From Joe Bastardi’s blog at Weatherbell, here is how one model sees the snow this weekend. (Cape Cod gets hammered, and we only get an inch….fine with me.)

2:30 PM  29.22 and steady. 21°,  and partly cloudy; some high clouds of the “junk” variety, but mostly low cumulus looking suspicious, like we might get some flurries.

10:00 PM –29.41– –14°–Scattered flurries

Thursday, 7:00 AM –29.55– –13°– Partly cloudy (Overnight low 10°)

 

 

LOCAL VIEW –To Step on a Nail–

I have a friend who insists we don’t need to clean up our act before we die, because we have been cleaning up after our children all our lives, and turn-about is fair play. We can therefore feel right about leaving our children a house full of rubbish, for them to clean up.

To a certain degree I agree. After all, when I was young I was spoiled, and didn’t have to do my own laundry, or make my own bed, but that is long, long time ago, and it seems I have had to spend a disproportionate amount of time paying back for that born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-my-mouth luxury.

The luxury of my childhood made me see how lovely life could be, which is a prerequisite of poetry. However another prerequisite of poetry seems to be that you spend a fair amount of time afterwards as a dishwasher. Others eat high on the hog and dirty the dishes, but you just clean up the mess.

Others ride the high horses, but you clean the stables.

Others eat the pickled herring from fancy jars, as you clean the guts and gurry in the cannery.

Others sniff the roses, but you are the gardener with hands bleeding from thorns.

And on and on it goes, year after year, until at age 63 I am running a Farm-childcare, as a so-called “Childcare Professional”. My wife gets irked when I say that job-title is a bunch of bosh, and I’m just a “babysitter”. Others work the fine jobs, as I change the diapers. Others spoil the children, and I deal with the tantrums. Basically it is a matter of cleaning up other people’s shit.

Some people are so irresponsible they basically poop in their own pants, in a thousand symbolic ways, and it is the duty of poets to clean up the filthy mess.

I’m sorry if that seems too crude and too blunt, but it seems a reality that young writers should be aware of. Too often young poets think they’ll spend all their entire life traipsing about rose gardens telling people how exquisite the blossoms smell. I have to sadly inform them that the only poets who succeed in remaining in rose gardens either have given up on writing, and are experts in rose genetics and cultivation, or else they are the gigolos of rich old ladies.

The real garden of real poetry involves less lovely smells. You sniff dish-washing soap, and diapers, and stables, and canneries, and the fumes of factories, but you work with the salt of the earth, and you learn where real beauty is found. You have to pay your dues if you want to sing the blues.

It is ironic in a way that the rich and powerful think they are controlling things, when they can’t even cook their own meals, wash their own dishes or laundry, or grow their own food or roses. In some cases, when they get old and decrepit, they even revert to diapers, and need someone to change those as well. In essence the rich and powerful are hapless and pathetic, but they like to think they have power over those they depend on, and have this word, “delegate”, that makes their dependence look like power.

In a better world those in the position to delegate work to others would be aware they are dependents. They would be full of gratitude and there would be none of this nonsense of some thinking they are so high and mighty. However, as heaven is not coming to earth (so far this week), the basic fact of the matter is that those who are the salt of the earth are in essence crucified. Real poets are included in this crucified crew.

Of course none is crucified to the degree the Christ was, but, to a lesser degree, in this fallen world, any good worker must put up with some degree of crucifixion. I know this is a sad truth to state to young poets who know how glorious and poetic life might be, “if only”, but “if only” is not the current state of affairs, and therefore the only alternative to some degree of crucifixion, and to singing the blues,  is to join those fat-cats who are fallen, but think they are high and mighty. Only fools want that.

I think it is far more high and mighty to change diapers. I’ve got a bumper sticker that states, “Men who change diapers change the world.”

I am pretty arrogant, I suppose, when I think I am superior to my superiors, but the fact of the matter is that history bears me out.

One of the greatest masters of music of the past was Bach, and he is remembered far more than any of the fat-cats he wrote his music for. In fact no one would remember  Brandenburg, if it weren’t for Bach. Yet, in his time, Bach was just a servant, even to the degree where he wore the same uniform as a butler.

Servants should take pride in the fact their pride is treated like a doormat. If Vanity is ugly, then the humble are beautiful, and therefore, if poets love beauty, they should love being dishwashers.

I should confess I hated washing dishes, at first.  But time has taught me that the very music of poetry is based upon giving others a gift they may not deserve, but need. Some times, washing dishes is the poetry, because it is needed, though the messy do not deserve it.

Therefore I recently concluded that, when I die, I didn’t want to leave my children an unholy mess to clean up, such as my father left me. Not that it wasn’t fun to sort through his mess and fill big dumpsters with trash, because I made thousands with other stuff on E bay. However that took hours upon hours, and I think my own kids have better things to do, and might prefer to skip that bother.

Therefore I decided to be noble, and clean up my trash before I die. I waited until the “Red Flag Warning” (caused by a local drought) was lifted, and then had a big fire.

Into the fire went all sorts of lumber which I hadn’t thrown away, because I “might” be able to use it, however I had never gotten around to those dream-projects. In fact some lumber had sat around waiting for so long that, even if I had gotten around to the project, the lumber would have been too rotted. However other lumber still might have been used, for such projects, but recent cancer confronted me with how brief my remaining time may be, and how unlikely it is I’ll ever do what I dream, and I understood saving such old lumber was a fool’s fond hope. I was making the farm much more tidy, by burning all the hopes that will not be.

Burning some of the hopes was a bit of a crucifixion for me personally, but I figured it would spare my children the crucifixion of cleaning up a dead parent’s mess, when I die. All in all, it seemed to be a way of making life more heavenly.  I even developed a sense of humor, and decided there was a delicious irony in the fact that, after cleaning up after others for so many years, I was cleaning up after myself. The last thing I imagined was that such cleanliness would increase my personal sense of crucifixion. In fact I felt vain, which always seems to all but beg for some sort of nail to come along and puncture my fat ego.

The crucifixion that then occurred didn’t involve anything as dramatic as stigmata on my palms.  Instead I just stepped on a nail, while burning a pile of old lumber. It was a beauty of an old, rusty spike, that sliced right through my boot’s sole and dove into the ball of my foot so deeply it was difficult to remove, despite the pain.

Oh, the irony! But that is what fuels poetry.

I’m not sure what it is about an old farm
That demands one has to, once every year,
Step down hard on a nail. All of the charm
Of rural life evaporates, yet, queer
As it may sound, the time you must then spend
Limping in pain reminds you that walking’s a gift.
After all, walking’s something that we tend
To take for granted. Our thighs and calves uplift
As humble feet deal with dirt. Our minds pretend
They’re high above such earthy cares, until
A nail spikes through our rubber sole, and we
Are forced to walk funny. Then pain’s our thrill,
Our focus, our consciousness, and our glee
Is when it stops. How we define mirth
Is bossed by one nail that brings us to earth.

When one nail can change things, life becomes simplified. Certain things are stricken from the daily schedule, and you attend to more boring things, which become poetic.  For example, how to identify the hawk that insists on screeching at you from limbs, but never stands still for a close up? Is this poetic?

My son insists it is a broad winged hawk, but I don’t know, as I limp about. It is just a screeching creature, that refuses to stand still for a zoomed in close-up. But that is not my job. My job is to attend to children, and to zoom in on them…..To forbid war-like things like video games and toy guns, and to teach them to be gentle young poets. But when I zoom in on them, what are they making of sticks, and what sort of respect are they showing me?

(Sometimes I get less respect than Rodney Dangerfield.)  I suppose some will suggest I should make sticks be illegal, but the sniper in a small boy somehow reminds me of young poets. Authority holds no glamour, and they think they can improve upon it.

I try to be big about getting assassinated from all sides by small boys in their make-believe worlds. (After all, on other days they treat me like a rock star.). However the violins of self-pity get going, after you have stepped on a nail. Walking hurts, hawks screech at you, and small boys snipe. Where is the justice!!!???

Even the pussy willows have gone by, before I could pick them and plunge them in glycerin and freeze them in suspended animation. If I’d done that I could have made a few extra bucks, selling them to flower shops. But, even though the spring is retarded and nothing else wants to bloom, the pussy willows jumped ahead. They are no longer the furry gray buds that flower shops pay for. The cat’s-fur gray is gone, and instead they look like this:

Hmm!  Not half bad!  Maybe the folk who shop in flower shops don’t know what they are missing.

Maybe the parents who don’t know their sons are snipers don’t know what they’re missing.

Maybe people who are never screamed at by hawks don’t know what they’re missing.

Maybe I’m lucky to step on a nail and limp around afterwards.

 

 

LOCAL VIEW –Wet As It Gets–

A quarter century ago I was the landscaper for a collection of old ladies my wife referred to as “your harem”, and though they are long gone they have left memories scattered about my yard. Below is an early bloomer one lady gave my wife, that she referred to as “miniature marsh marigold”.  

Actually it turns out to be an invasive species, Lesser celandine, (Ficaria Verna), and belongs over in England. Wordsworth wrote a poem about it (“To The Small Celandine”) with this stanza:

Ere a leaf is on a bush,
In the time before the Thrush
Has a thought about it’s nest,
Thou wilt come with half a call,
Spreading out thy glossy breast
Like a careless Prodigal;
Telling tales about the sun,
When we’ve little warmth, or none.

Actually I should scold that old lady for giving us a plant which is currently invading the back lawn and killing the grass. It only lasts until June, and then withers up and leaves a dead-looking place. But I’d rather smile, and remember how that silver-haired hunchback would come out with a cup of tea for me and involve me in discussions about poetry, as I weeded. I figured poetry-talk was an extra benefit of having me as her landscaper. I could chatter as I worked, and it even excused me for the time I stopped working, to sip some tea with dirty hands. Not that she’d ever just fork out the bucks that would have let me skip the weeding, and just write. But I forgave her for that. I think young poets get over that resentment once they are over thirty, and I was pushing forty, though working for old ladies made me feel a lot younger.

In April I’d go from being on the verge of bankruptcy to having too much work, from being disdained to being hugely popular. The old ladies would become wildly ambitious with the first hints of warm weather, and I often had to act like the sage, old man, reining them back. The worst year was 1990, when we had a record-setting, early-April hot spell with temperatures up over 90° F, and my elderly customers felt like putting out tomato plants. I warned them it could snow the following week, and when it did snow I looked very wise.

This year it wasn’t so hot, as it only got up to 77° on April 1st, but the following cold did set records, as it only could get up to 26° during the snow on April 4, and had dropped to 4° on the morning of April 5. (Concord, New Hampshire; official NOAA statistics.)

A 73° swing in temperatures is very hard on plants, especially plants from western Europe, because the Atlantic protects Europe from most arctic blasts. One European plant (nearly invasive, though few call it that,)  that got hit hard last week was the daffodils. They are designed to spring up before the trees have put out their foliage, in sunny places that will turn into shady places as the trees leaf out, and, because they come out so early, they’ve been created to withstand frost, and even a moderate freeze, but the extreme freeze they were hit by in New Hampshire this year was like nothing their ancestors ever experienced on the shores of the Mediterranean. It seemed to rupture whatever holds them up, at the bottoms of their stems, and they all fell face down. Some that were buds still had enough remaining capillaries to bloom, but they lack charm when their blooms kiss the dirt. 

Some others look like their buds are going to simply turn brown, and not bloom. Having such dismal failure follow high hopes was a significant setback to manic, maypole moods.

Old-timers like myself anticipated a second setback would be the cold rain that always comes, as the warm weather tries to push back north. There have been years when the maps show warm fronts up to New Jersey, and even up into Massachusetts, that never quite make it this far north. One needs to make a study of cold-loving plants, if one wants to start a garden, and the old-timers tended to just chuckle at the “flatlanders” who came up to New Hampshire and wanted to get going in their gardens before Memorial Day.  Many old-timers would make a day of putting their garden in on May 31, in one big rush, and by July their gardens were doing as well as the gardens of people who hurried things in April and early May. (In fact some warmth-loving plants like peppers seem to sulk if chilled, and never do all that well, if put out too early.)

When the warm fronts stalls south of us, all we get is a cold rain. Because my Farm-childcare focuses on the outdoors, we are not stopped by the slighter rains and mists. One thing I have found enchants the children is to follow a stonewall through the damp woods, looking for signs of life.

Besides the lichens and mosses, it has seemed the local plants have more sense than the European imports, and are holding back. Even the swamp maples only raspberry-misted the tips of their silver branches with swelling buds during the mold spell, but didn’t burst into full bloom. Down in the swamps skunk cabbage is blooming, but that is an uncanny species that creates warmth, and can actually melt its way up through ice. All in all there is a sense everything is about to explode, but is not quite there yet. Of course, this doesn’t keep the exploration from being fun.

And then, at long last, the pussy willow (Salix Discolor)  bloomed. An older girl noted them at the very end of a day, and I immediately had my next day all planned out. 

However the slighter rains gave way to not so slight rains.

When all the world is getting drenched, we don’t go out more than we have to. It is not so much that the children mind getting drenched, as it is they tire of being drenched fairly swiftly, and then it becomes a major project drying all their cloths for the next adventure.

In every rain there are times when the downpour slacks off, and you can go for short walks before rushing back, when the rain starts up again. The pussy willows were too far away for such a walk, but I like to take the kids out and show them how every drop on every twig has an upside-down world within it, with the sky at the bottom. Its something most people walk by all the time and never notice, but you don’t have to go far from shelter to see it.

And just because it is likely wise to avoid drenching children, hunting pussy willows, it does not mean I can’t drench myself.

April’s cruel teasing has made the blooms bow
Face down in the mud, and the peeping frogs
Have gone silent, but time has taught me how
To tread a stream-side’s sedge and rotted logs,
Wading through a wet day with hopeful eyes
Seeking the gray, silver-fox fur of buds
Among the jewels of a hanging surprise
On every twig. On every twig the mud’s up
And the sky’s down as clear drops magnify
A topsy-turvy world, each drop dark-topped
And silver-bottomed, and, as I press by,
All drenching me until my joy’s unstopped
And I decide it’s not such a bad life
If I gather pussy willows for my wife.