Socialists have never liked the freedom of small farmers, as the idea of liberty resulting in good things jars their concept of “collective” good. Stalin took this to an absurd length in his efforts to utterly wipe out the “Kulak”, who were seen as “class enemies” of the poorer serfs. Lenin described the Kulak as “bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten themselves during famines”.
In actual fact the last Czars created the Kulak in an effort to lessen the tendency of the serfs to rebel and join radical and militant movements, such as communism. Rather than veritable slaves who owned no land, the serfs were given the opportunity to borrow money and purchase land from wealthy landowners. In a sense it was a mortgage, which the better farmers paid back, becoming small landowners. Generally speaking, a Kulak was a small farmer who owned more than 8 acres.
As is often the case, the lazy did not become prosperous. It was the farmers with ingenuity and industry who became Kulaks. They produced a disproportionate amount of Russia’s food, and for the most part were conservative in their outlooks. Therefore they became the “petite bourgeois” communists despise.
Stalin killed roughly a million, either through murder or through starvation. He sent hundreds of thousands to gulags in Siberia, and more than a hundred thousand left for gulags but never arrived. Stalin felt that by removing such “weeds” the remaining population would be pure, and productive. In actual fact the production of grain plummeted, and there was a terrible famine, especially in the Ukraine, which is one reason there is animosity between Ukrainians and Russians to this day.
During the final days of the Soviet Union small farmers were once again allowed to farm small lots, and immediately out-produced the collectives. 5% of the farmers produced 50% of the food. This should teach a lesson, namely: People with ingenuity and industry have more value than lazy people.
Of course, it is deemed wrong to say any person has more value than another. And it is likely true that God cares for the lazy as much (if not more) than he cares for the industrious. After all, the lazy need help. They need motivation. Whether that help takes the form of a caress or a kick-in-the-butt likely depends on the person and the administrator. However, when it comes down to food on the table, having food has more value than lacking food; hence some people have more value than others, in that particular way.
In my time I’ve lived with many hardscrabble farmers who have first hand experience with the difference between feast and famine, and I found they had a sort of common sense which college students lacked. The college students borrowed money and ate in cafeterias, while the Navajo wove rugs and used the money they made to buy things their land could not produce, such as cooking oil. Their land could produce little that is needed to subsist on a vegan diet, but their land could support sheep. Therefore they ate a lot of mutton. In like manner the old New England farmers only had a little land they could grow vegetables on, but much stony land that could be used for cows, sheep, goats and pigs, and they tended to have diets which included meat and dairy products. Yet college students often looked down their noses at such practicality, and, if radical, tended to castigate non-vegan people, like Lenin cursed the Kulak.
I have tried to educate these idealistic, vegan college students, but usually have failed, and often have been dragged into arguing about politics which has little to do with eating. Therefore I was glad to come across this explanation of the practical side of farming, which I think every vegan should watch.
Ordinarily, when you write an introductory paragraph, you have already arrived at some sort of conclusion, and you are just preparing for the body of the writing which will develop along preordained lines and arrive at the preordained conclusion. However, I haven’t figured everything out, so this is more of a diary entry. It just describes a bad day, which, like most bad days, has a funny side.
I suppose I should begin with a description of my bad mood. I’ll try (and likely fail) to keep it short.
I have been perplexed by the fact a single letter can alter the word “weeding” to “wedding” and make such a difference. “Weeding” no one wants to help with; you have to pay people to help, but “wedding” sparks more generous impulses. Everyone wants to help.
It just so happens I am far more serious than usual about my vegetable garden this year. Usually I can laugh, if the experiment results in amazingly fertilized weeds towering eight feet tall. I just notch it up to experience. “Next year I’ll handle weeding differently.”
But this year is different, with people’s retirement savings shrinking by 50% even as their retirement costs increase by 50%. I myself am not retired, but at age 69 most of my friends are, and I am well aware this is a disaster for people who worked long and hard, and trusted the “system”. It now looks like the “system” was not trustworthy.
With inflation so bad, people are looking for things to invest in that will not lose value. Some take their money from stocks and invest in gold. I don’t have that much money and own no stocks, but I invest in a sort of gold I dig from the dirt, called “carrots”. I am a gold miner.
How is this a good investment? Actually, it is a bad investment, at April rates. You see, if I plant eight feet of carrots it will see me and my wife through next winter, and I can handle weeding eight feet. But not thirty-two feet. Thirty-two feet involves hiring weeders, which raises the cost of the carrots. At April rates such carrots would be absurdly expensive, perhaps as much as ten dollars a pound. But, with the Swamp malfunctioning so grotesquely, April rates don’t even apply to June. In a worst-case scenario, carrots might be a hundred dollars a pound by November, in which case my bad investment mysteriously becomes a good one.
I have planted long rows of all sorts of stuff which will be handy to have, if we are in dire straits by Autumn, but I’m having a hard time finding workers. It’s hard enough finding workers for my Childcare, which pays my bills, and the extra work of the garden stresses me out.
Worst is that few see things as dire as I am seeing them, (though a few are starting to come around to my way of seeing). Most townsfolk are wonderful, for nothing phases them. They can be buffeted by life, and they are like the “Whos in Whoville”, who were not bothered when the “Grinch” stole Christmas and they sang carols anyway. I like such people very much, and they are one reason I plant extra carrots. A carrot might be a nice gift to give them, next Christmas.
But just because I like and admire them doesn’t mean I should have to give up on my garden. And that is the point where the frustration and irritation start to perturb my mind, and I find myself grumbling to God. And praying He help me stop muttering to my Maker, and instead sing “This is the day the Lord has made” when I arise.
But I want to garden yet am under a sort of pressure to be a family man and do family stuff, for example attend a grandchild’s ballgames. Not that it is a bad thing, especially when the class displayed by both the players and the crowd (on both sides) makes professional athletes look shameful. It was an excellent game, 2-0 with tension in every inning, and my grandson’s team came out on top.
Yet the whole time I’m thinking about my garden. I’m even thinking that, if I really cared, I’d sacrifice the ballgame for the garden. After all, it would be a terrible thing if my grandchild lacked a carrot next January, and it was my fault.
Thinking along these lines not only sours a delightful ballgame; it sours life in general. I was frowning at speeches at a granddaughter’s graduation. And it even was souring the approaching wedding of my daughter. I felt divided and irked by the fact my help was wanted even as few would help me. For example, the wedding involved all sorts of stuff arriving via UPS and Amazon, which resulted in a towering stack of cardboard boxes at the Childcare. Someone had to take them all to the recycling center, and that someone was me. It intruded upon my Saturday “day off” schedule of weed, weed, weed, transplant, and weed, and I confess to being a bit frosty, when I was asked to dispose of the cardboard. But I did it, muttering to my Maker. And my reward?
Lydia, my lone surviving goat, who lives a life as pampered as a cat, chose to use the time I was absent from the farm to carefully pick her way through all sorts of edible weeds to my pride and joy, (and favorite vegetable), some cauliflower plants which promised to grow heads a foot across, and chomped them down to mere stubs protruding from the earth.
All my warm feelings towards that goat vanished, and I considered turning her to goat-burgers. In other words, I was becoming unreasonable. It didn’t help when someone stated I should not blame the goat and instead should tend to my fences. Like I have time! I can’t even weed, when there isn’t rain and I have to water my long rows, in which case I am also watering the weeds!
In a way that could be my motto for the past two years: “Like I have time!”. Just as I have to choose between weeding and watering, there have been all too many situations wherein, in doing one thing, I neglect another.
For example, last week I took my 2000 Jeep Cherokee to the local garage because the brakes of the old clunker were making a scraping sound, (“Like I have time for this!”) and, while fixing the brakes the mechanic observed the vehicle wasn’t inspected. I felt a sort of shock. That was a job I should have done in February! The fellow said he could inspect it quickly, if I had the registration, but, when I checked the registration, I realized the vehicle was also unregistered. How could I miss that!? Thinking back, I vaguely recalled attempting to do it on-line, but running into some glitch where the computer refused to cooperate. Somehow that exasperating attempt manufactured a feeling in my mind that the effort had been made and the job was done, when it wasn’t. (I recall wondering why nothing came in the mail, and no money vanished from my account.) In any case, I told my mechanic I’d be back in a few days, when I found time to stop in at the Town Office and register the Jeep.
In case you are wondering how I could drive around unregistered and uninspected, blame the coronavirus. Our small-town police-chief has had between two part-time officers, and zero part-time officers. An airhead like myself could drive about in flagrant violation of the law and never be reprimanded.
Come to think of it, the coronavirus had me as hard-pressed as our police-chief, as I kept a Childcare open despite the Swamp’s efforts to shut everything down. However, that was old news, and we are facing new news, which is crazy inflation and crashing markets and the fact we might be running out of food by November. Thank you, Brandon.
However, my little town, in its efforts to recover from the coronavirus, had recently sworn in three young officers to help the chief. They were from out of town, which meant they had no understanding of why an old coot like me might be driving around with no registration and no inspection. (I mention this to create what is called “Foreshadowing”)
My first dim awareness that things had changed occurred when I was trying to snatch a nap after lunch on a day when I had to cover for an absent worker at the Childcare in the morning. Though I lay down I never napped. First, I got a call that a child had a finger caught in a sleighbell at the Childcare. (The metal had a hole created by turning metal inward, which allowed a little finger to slip in, but caught the finger when it tried to slip out.) As the child was weeping, this was a critical crisis, but the adroit use of tip snips freed the finger, and I settled back to nap. Then a second call disturbed me to remind me to attend my grandson’s championship game. I already knew that. And then the third interruption was a loud crashing, scraping sound in front of my house. When I blearily went to the window, I noted the driver leaving the car and running away. It looked like his car was not pulled-over to the side, but was in the middle of the lane on a sharp curve.
I gave up on my nap and went outside to see. Yes, he was stopped in the center of his lane, on a dangerous curve. His jury-rigged tie rods had failed and dropped his front axle on the right side, flattening a tire. I dialed 911 and reported the situation, and then directed traffic, including two school buses, to avoid people pulling out into the opposite lane (to get around the stopped car) from crashing headlong into cars coming the other way around the sharp curve. Most people assumed the car was my car and asked me if I needed help. That irked me a bit. It was like I was getting blamed. I figured I was actually a sort of minor hero, though I was mostly irked I hadn’t napped and might be late to my grandson’s game. But rather than the chief taking twenty minutes to arrive as usual, a young officer arrived in only ten minutes followed by two more five minutes later.
The young officers seemed inexperienced, as if it was the first time they’d seen such a predicament and weren’t exactly certain of how to handle it by-the-book. Likely it wasn’t covered in school. They disagreed about the correct procedure and seemed to be a little rude to each other, and also to me. One fellow was offended by my inability to describe the driver, who I’d only blearily and briefly glimpsed through a screen. I supposed they were learning on the fly, dealing with their own inexperience in such situations, but I vainly thought I myself had handled the situation pretty well, without schooling. I shrugged, left them to their learning, and went to get ready to my grandson’s game.
By the time I came back out to hop in my Jeep and leave for the game the officers had set out cones and positioned the two policecars, with lights flashing to alert traffic to the problem. They also were dealing with the driver, who had returned with the help he’d run off to find. Rather than understanding this was how we deal with problems in our rural way, they were giving him a hard time for “leaving the scene of an accident.” I blithely forgot that my sticker was expired, cheerfully waving while weaving my way through all the parked vehicles on the curve to go to the game. The police were too busy to notice the criminal in their midst.
(This is further foreshadowing.)
To skip ahead past the delightful ballgame, the next day found my reason failing. I was at the point described as, “losing all reason.” The goat eating my cauliflower was just the final straw. Further irritations came from things which should have pleased me. For example, all my hard work, (and the cool weather) resulted in a bountiful growth of lettuce. How could that irk me?
Well, I was irked because having all that lettuce meant I had work more, figuring out who to give it to, and how to do it. Would I never be free of further work? In a fit of independence, after taking all the boxes to the recycling center I decided the heck with both weeding and weddings, and drove to a local greenhouse to buy cauliflower seedlings. It was very selfish of me, but I do like cauliflower.
Even though I was civil and polite with the industrious woman who sells seedlings, part of my mind was in rebellion. Despite all my religion I was thinking of nasty and hurtful ways to make the point that I felt like I was giving and never getting. Even my goat was against me.
It was as I returned from the greenhouse with cauliflower seedlings waving from the dashboard, grumbling to God because I knew I was thinking nasty and hateful thoughts, and suggesting He should have created creation and me differently, that I passed one of the young policemen, heading the other way, eager to prove he was good at enforcing the law. As I continued up the road, I glanced in my rear-view mirror and saw his lights come on, and thought, “I hope that’s not for me. I hope he got called to another crisis.” Just then I saw a little lane ahead. It occurred to me that if I pulled into that lane I’d be out of his way if he was off to another crisis, and also that, if he was after me, he might not find me. Big mistake.
He must have turned around with adroitness I never expected. Last thing I saw in my rear-view mirror he was headed the opposite way. I was pretty much pulled into the narrow, shaded lane, but the butt of my old jeep was still visible from the main road, when I heard the police car’s modern siren make that weird noise sirens now make. It reminds me of the flying saucer in one of the first video games, (“Space Invaders”); (twenty-five cents per game, in 1969.) I figured he had seen me, and was after me, so I pulled over.
The young man came whizzing into the side lane practically on two wheels and had to brake hard to avoid smashing into me. The lane was a narrow one. He stopped dead center in the street, blocking traffic both ways. I thought he looked a little flushed as he came to my window. Pulling me over was likely the most exciting thing he’d seen, in our sleepy little town. An actual pursuit!
He asked me for my license and registration and I sighed deeply for I knew the registration was expired. I deserved a ticket. Instead, I got arrested and handcuffed.
It happened like this: He asked me, “Why did you accelerate into this lane?”
“I did not accelerate.”
“But why pull into this lane?”
I said, “I know people who live down this lane,” which was no lie, but for some weird reason I decided God would not like it if I insinuated that I had pulled into the lane to see an old friend, so I added, “But if you want the truth, I was hoping to avoid you.”
“You saw my lights?”
“Yes”.
I noticed the young man’s face became much redder, and thought to myself, “Big Mistake.”
He announced, “I am going to have to ask you to step from the car. You are under arrest for resisting arrest.”
“What!!!???”
“I have to cuff you and take you to the station and charge you.”
“This is rediculous.” But, as it seemed I’d be resisting arrest if I said I wasn’t resisting arrest, I got out of my Jeep and was told to stand facing my Jeep, and, at age 69, for the first time in my life, felt cold steel clamp around my wrists. I did say, “Aren’t you supposed to read me my rights, or something like that,” and the officer replied, “We do that at the station.”
I think I may have been the first person the young fellow had the chance to handcuff, for they were much too tight. But I now commend him for choosing an old geezer to practice on, and not some drug-addled musclebound punk of nineteen who was full of hormones. (Having run a Childcare, I know even when you have another’s hands under control, considerable damage can be done to your nose with a forehead, even by a four-year-old). But I didn’t butt, and instead, despite the pain in my wrists, was extremely polite and well-behaved. The young man was swept up in a whirlwind of procedure, making the correct reports on his radio, and asking me all the correct questions, and seemed so inexperienced and over-his-head I did my best to be helpful. I sat as he wanted, in the rear of his police car.
I must say that seat is designed to be uncomfortable. Hard plastic. No cushions. No place you want to sit with your hands behind your back. I sat sort of sideways, as the pain in my wrists diminished slightly when I sat that way, and I must have looked uncomfortable. The young officer suddenly paused and asked me, “Do those cuffs hurt?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if you agree to obey, I can cuff your hands in front.”
“Sure. I’ll agree. Don’t worry. I’m a good guy.”
(There may have been some sarcasm hidden in my statement, for policemen are supposed to capture bad guys, and perhaps I was suggesting he had arrested the wrong guy. But never mind that. Such subtlety was over Barney Fife’s head.)
In a fit of unexpected compassion, the young officer unhandcuffed me and then re-handcuffed me with my hands in front of me. As I held my wrists forward to be re-handcuffed the red dents in my skin caused by the prior handcuffing were plain to see, and he handcuffed more gently the second time. Live and learn. I am proud to be part of the education of a young officer.
But the world sure does look different from the back of a police care, on your way to the station to be booked. My fret about the one letter difference between “weeding” and “wedding”, and the crises about carrots, cauliflowers and lettuce, abruptly seemed removed and far away.
I did remember to consult God, which I was glad to see myself do. Usually, when I am abruptly in some tornado outside my ordinary experience, I forget the very One I should be thinking of, and instead am engrossed by the interesting turn my life has taken. Even if I stepped into an elevator with no floor, and was falling to my doom, rather than my final words being “Oh God” I fear they would be “Oh Shit!”. But in this bizarre situation I actually did remember God, and my conversation was a mix of “What is going on?” and “Help!”
Next, I got to see how hardened criminals are treated at police stations. I was handcuffed to a bench for around an hour as legalities were attended to: What were the actual charges, and what bail should be set, and who would be my bail-bondsman. One of my hands was released so I could sign certain papers, but my other hand remained handcuffed. I asked the young officer if he could allow me to use my cellphone to take a picture of my handcuffed hand, and he said it would be OK. (I was thinking it would make my blog more interesting than pictures of my hand, picking green lettuce.)
(By this point I think I had persuaded the young officer I was not a dangerous threat, and actually am a kindly old man. I thanked him when he brought me a glass of water. I mean a plastic cup of water. (Glass would obviously be too dangerous.) And I found things to chat about. For example, as he fingerprinted me, using old-fashioned ink, I told him that when I got fingerprinted by the state police because the state requires it for my Childcare, they had a new-fangled, ink-free computer screen to press fingers on. He begrudged our town couldn’t afford that update yet.
Mentioning my Childcare made him curious, and he asked me a few unprofessional questions pertaining to my Childcare and not my case, and I cheerfully regaled him with a few recent episodes.
As I studied the three sets of fingerprints he was required to take, I mentioned my prints sure had a lot of scars, but that I supposed I hadn’t kept track of all the cuts my fingertips have received, as a hands-on sort of worker, now pushing seventy. (Too much information? Not sure. I was painting a self-portrait for the young man, hopefully making him feel a little ashamed for handcuffing such a sweet, old man.)
We even joked a little. He had to ask me a long list of careful questions he read from a sheet of paper, such as, “Do you have diabetes, high blood-pressure, cancer…” and so forth, an then he paused, looked at me, and said, “I’ve got to ask these…Are you pregnant?” I made some politically incorrect comment that made him laugh, though he said nothing, because we were being automatically filmed by a camera by the ceiling, and cancel culture is so rampant even policemen obey unwritten laws.
Next I had to raise bail, which involved getting a bondsman. After a long wait my tax accountant came walking in, and cheerfully said, “Hi Caleb.” As I replied, “Hi Brenda,” the young officer looked surprised. I added, “I got in trouble trying to avoid trouble. Sorry you had to drive all this way on a Saturday.”
Brenda replied, “No trouble. I have another job, next town over, so I have to drive down this way anyway.”
The young officer looked mystified. How could such a familiarity be? Was I such a habitual criminal that I knew the bail bondsman on a first name basis? (In an area of small towns a single person can have five or six jobs.)
After that we were pretty much done. The station-computer produced twelve sheets of paper and I signed five of them. The other seven involved my rights, and a form to fill out if I wanted court-appointed lawyer, (involving a lengthy interrogation about my income), and lastly the date of my arraignment.
The officer also gave me two warnings, one for no inspection and one for no registration. I stated I’d take care of it right away.
Then he said he’d drive me back to my jeep. He could only then return the boxcutter I’d had in my back pocket. I joked, “Now I have to think of what I’m going to tell my wife.”
He looked curious. “What are you going to tell her?”
“I’m thinking maybe I won’t go home.”
(To be continued)
(Memory: in 1985, out west, I asked a Navajo how he dared drive around without plates, and he replied, “Do they make your car drive any better? Your white-man-laws are stupid.”)
Running a Childcare makes me especially aware of what every parent is sadly made conscious of: What strikes an older person as beautiful and worth sharing make strike the young as exceedingly disagreeable. And the young may become disagreeable in response. For example, when the parents of the cartoon character Calvin of “Calvin and Hobbes” take him out to see the pristine beauty of a fresh fall of snow, Calvin doesn’t appreciate it.
At some point I decided it was more enjoyable to garden alone. In 2019 I had my most successful garden ever, simply because I stopped inflicting gardening upon people who have the sane opinion that dirt is dirty. I had more fun, they had more fun, yet at the time of the harvest I had second thoughts, which I go into, in an old, 2019 post:
The long-winded post contained a sonnet which is sneakily revolutionary as it is only 13 lines when they are supposed to have 14.
I wish they were as old-fashioned as I.
Though frost cuts, I heap a heating harvest,
Yet I no longer even bother to try
To get them to sweat, though reaping’s blessed.
Today I hauled a hundred pounds of squash
To my larder. For me that’s four hundred
Meals. But I know they’d, with piggy squeals, quash
All joy from my harvest, whining they’ve bled
And are wounded, because fall’s frost cuts.
Those who don’t plant don’t know why they’re fed.
Their fine complaints are but signs they lack guts.
They think they make sense, while making me groan
For no man likes to reap harvests alone.
To spare you the effort of following my meandering mind down all the rabbit holes of convoluted logic, the post wound up concluding that no man is an island, and I should find a way to avoid gardening alone. It also confessed I saw no foreseeable way of doing so.
This seems especially true of weeding. I like weeding, but many suggests this proves I’ve gone completely bonkers in my old age.
Why do I like it? Perhaps it is because, as you age, the fingers are still nimble, (providing you are spared arthritis), when the rest of you huffs and puffs doing what once was quite ordinary.
I once saw a film showing the pianist Artur Rubinstein at age ninety. Always a bit of an exhibitionist, he allowed the film to begin with him getting out of bed, so ancient and stiff he has trouble getting loose enough to stand up and walk, but then he sits at the piano and loosens up his fingers running through a few scales, and then, with startling swiftness, is able to play flowing rhapsodies of music. Probably it isn’t as good as he could play as a young man of seventy, but still it was utterly amazing, and also proof using your fingers doesn’t make you huff and puff. And weeding is using your fingers. It doesn’t make you huff and puff. Furthermore, if I may be so bold, I am a sort of Artur Rubinstein of weeding.
My problem is I plant too much. If I only planted short rows, it wouldn’t be any challenge, but with his Fraudulency, Biden, seeming out to create a famine, short rows are not long enough. But then, if you plant long rows, you create long rows to weed. And this year I am so serious about planting long rows that the weeds are already springing up while I am still planting the long rows.
This is especially true in the case of carrots. Carrots are good keepers, when winter comes around. Ordinarily I wouldn’t need to plant that many. After all, how many plastic, one-pound bags of carrots does my wife buy at the market for us in the course of a winter? Maybe a pound every two weeks? Even if you call our northern winters 24 weeks long and add another 8 weeks until we can harvest our first carrots next year, that’s only 16 pounds. A double-row of eight feet will do. Easy. (Especially if, God willing, I get some huge, half-pound carrots.) But, if Biden has his way, and we all starve to stop Global Warming, I’ll need some extra, for family and friends and church suppers. Therefore I’m starting with four times what I need; thirty-two feet of double-rowed carrots. (If I have time and space I may add a later crop. But, to start, let us see if the first doesn’t kill me.)
The thing about carrots is that they are tiny seeds that produce the feeblest, hair-like seedlings. Meanwhile the weeds grow boisterously, swiftly twice as high and twice as large. Compare a carrot seeding:
And here are weeds:
And here are carrots and weeds squaring off to do battle.
Actually, they don’t square off like that. The above is actually the edge of the weeded area and the non-weeded area. The carrots are hidden by the weeds, in the non-weeded area. Therefore, you must have fingers like Rubinstein and weed very carefully. After selecting the largest weeds, and pulling them, you start to see the carrots underneath, and can pull the smaller weeds.
If you only planted eight feet of carrots the weeds would never get so far ahead of you, but if your eyes are bigger than your stomach, in a gardener sort of way, this is your plight. The fortunate thing is that, although the carrots are tiny, they have deep tap roots, and only a few get torn up as you uproot the larger weeds. (And that actually thins the carrots, which is a later job. First you must help the carrots survive, before you can even get to the point where you worry about thinning.)
This year has been very dry, so my scarce free time has been usurped by having to do what the clouds should do and do better: Water. It is very important to water the tiny carrots for if they get too dry before their tiny roots shoot downward as tap roots, they just die on you. But even as you save them you are watering the weeds.
Then when it did rain, it was thunder rain, which is somehow loaded with nitrogen by cloud-to-cloud lightning. It is wonderful as it causes all your plants to abruptly leap upwards, but horrible because it has the exact same effect on weeds. The earth which looked so brown and weed-free after rototilling abruptly is lush with a kazillion weeds.
It was obvious I needed help, with so many feet of planted plants all getting weedy at once. My daughter and daughter-in-law have been very helpful, but my daughter is about to get married, and I didn’t live so long by telling women weeding is more important than weddings (even if it is.)
Just about every business in town has a help-wanted sign, so finding help from outside seems unlikely. Therefore, my wife suggested I turn to our Childcare staff. I cringed. I didn’t want to offend them. But, to my astonishment, they responded favorably. (Perhaps controlling weeds is easier than controlling children.)
One thing I never expected was for them to be so gracious, as I instructed them. I expected them to behave as if I was asking them to ingest poison, but instead they behaved as if I was Rubinstein teaching them piano. Even my boring sidetracks (into how this weed is edible and the juice of that weed is good for bug-bites) didn’t cause their eyeball to fall out with boredom, but rather they found me fascinating. (I would say it is the difference between a teenager and an adult, but one was a teenager.) We chattered away and I actually found myself enjoying myself. Then I left them to weed alone, and they worked tirelessly under a blazing sun.
They were slower than me, but more painstaking. I tend to leave the smallest weeds, just attacking the big stuff, but they left the carrot patch utterly weed free, and made great headway down the second patch. I’ve never been so ahead of the weeds, at this point.
And just to show I am not one of those exploitive bosses who sits in some office as others do the work, here is that same row of carrots after I got down on my knees and completed the job. (Please note how I used the pulled weeds as mulch.)
This is only one small skirmish in a larger battle, yet it strikes me strangely as a sort of miracle. The weeding not only got done, but it was fun. The girls actually said they liked it.
I don’t know what I am doing differently. Weeding caused my own children to experience post-traumatic stress and likely will cost them a fortune in therapy, just to recover. But this year my employees behave as if I am doing them a favor. (Maybe I should have paid my kids for feeding them.)
This brings me to the bottom line, grubbier than dirt. How much are these carrots going to cost me? Well, that all depends on the price of carrots next fall. At current prices my carrots are a very bad deal, but, if Biden saves the world from Global Warming by having carrots cost a hundred dollars a pound by November, my little patch will be a gold mine.
They are back. The dreaded Colorado Potato Beetle.
Due to Fraudulent Biden’s apparent aim of starving us all, I planted more potatoes than usual, and was alarmed to see these pretty, little beetles even as the potatoes emerged. My only strategy is to squish them like crazy, which requires vigilance and steadfast attention. Slack off, and with amazing speed your potato patch will be reduced from bushy leaves to a bunch of sad-looking stalks.
Squishing is gross, even if you only have one plant, and I have a hundred, so I turned to the web to see what other gardeners had to say about the beetle battle.
I really like the gardener’s gatherings on the web, for the government hasn’t gotten involved and doesn’t say what can be said and what can’t be said. Not that they aren’t planning to do it, but they haven’t yet focused on the little gardeners, (who in this case should be called “small potatoes”.) Therefore, you get a wonderful variety of ideas.
There is something very wonderful about the ideas of commoners, when they are ungoverned. People are amazingly experimental and come up with all sorts of theories I’d never dream up. Of course, many theories are wrong and get shot down and crash in flames, often by Mother Nature herself, (which makes a funny story if told correctly), but sometimes by another gardener who starts by saying, “I tried that once and…” It is actually a sort of peer-review, as ideas are bounced about in an atmosphere of freedom. I think it proves the superiority of Liberty to Socialism, but that would take a long post to describe, and this post is about the beetle battle.
One thing I wondered was, “Where do these blasted beetles come from?” There are two views. Some say they sleep in the soil, and some say they migrate up from the south like monarch butterflies. In any case, they ordinarily eat some Colorado species of wild poison-nightshade, and had a niche in nature in remote mountains, but for some reason potatoes are a species of the nightshade family that causes the beetle to go berserk, and allowed it to spread from coast to coast, driving gardeners equally berzerk.
There are all sorts of remedies mentioned by gardeners, most of which I don’t have time for. But one common theme I kept chancing upon was a joke. The post would have some catchy headline such as, “Surefire Organic Cure For Potato Beetles.” Then, when you read the post, you discovered the cure was to squish them. Apparently I’m not the only one who has sought a better way.
One interesting killer is a sort of bacteria which shrivels up the larvae, but that must be applied when the larvae are small, and washes off in rain, so some larvae may sneak by and get large, so after all that bother you wind up needing to squish them anyway. And they are slimly, ugly things.
It is amazing how swiftly these eating-machines can turn a plant from leaves to mere stalks, and any loss of more than 30% of your leaves starts to shrink your crop. Therefore, I do my best to kill the adults before they lay any eggs. But they are swift and sneaky, so I also hunt for eggs, which are bright yellow, but on the underside of leaves where you can’t see them. So, as I start to hill my potatoes, I look for leaves that look like something has eaten them.
Then I flip the leaf over…
Unlike the eggs of squash bugs, these eggs are soft, so you have to face the unpleasantness. There is no way around it. You must squish.
And, if you have a hundred potato plants, you must do this over and over and over and over and… And, so far, I think I’ve prevented around a thousand of those pretty little eggs from becoming those utterly disgusting larvae. I squish to avoid squishier squishing.
I’m afraid I’m going to be a complete failure, when it comes to aging gracefully. I never seem to learn. Even when I creak out of bed crippled from some foolishness I enacted the day before, and tell myself it serves me right, and that from now on I will act my age, before you know it, I’m tempted into the next foolishness.
I blame it on the kids. They don’t respect the fact I’m an elder and am supposed to be doddering, and instead say, “Let’s go!”
The winter seemed too long. There is no spring
In my step this spring. I'm feeble and frail
As the bluebirds return. I spread a wing
That seems molted. It seems I can't set sail
And yet...See how I'm sailing! A man's heart
Can't abide quailing. Though his legs and lungs
May not set him dancing, his heart will start
Romancing and singing. Though what is sung's
In a reedy voice, the listeners weep
For they hear a warm heart that will persist
Though flesh stops thumping. No sky is too steep
Nor wings too molted to ever resist
The uplift of God's reverse-gravity
Where lead's left behind and the light's set free.
Other old-timers, even older than I am, are also doing a poor job of retiring, and instead seem determined to change the world in their decrepitude with some strange idea called “The Great Reset”. They used to smile teeth and bat eyes and sweet talk about how what they did was “for the children”, but lately they have stopped even pretending. They talk about a mother’s “right to abort”, even after the child is born, which seems like murder to me, and they’ve created a baby-food shortage by closing a major plant over a technicality and dragging their feet about reopening it. They are creating other shortages as well, such as a shortage of heating oil which may chill children next winter, and even shortages of food. None of this seems good “for the children”, but these senile old fossils in Washington never come to me for advice. All I can do is fight in a farmer’s way, which is to fight a food shortage.
You can't have summer's long days without winter's
Long nights, yet when my wall's calendar strays
From April to May I wish the splinters
Of ice to never return. Gone are grays
And only green is seen. I would hit the brakes;
Stop the calendar if I could. I see
Why some flee to Florida, but that makes
The long days shorter. Hot tropic's country
Has twelve-hour days. They can never know
Our glut of sunshine; our wild overdose
Of glee, nor how swiftly gardens will grow
Given such kindness. I pull the time close
And beg compassion forever to stay.
Healing is sweet after overmuch gray.
Something about an old fossil like me taking on the fossils of the Deep State does seem absurd. It is like a very old David with a cane taking on a gigantic, hobbling Goliath. But May is a month of miracles.
I heard the catbird singing and stumbled
From bed to the coffee pot with my eyes
Still shut, then glanced at the clock and grumbled.
It was long before dawn. That bird's sweet cries
Were to the sinking moon. The other way
Saw planets rising like a string of pearls.
First Saturn, then Mars, then, with hints of day,
Jupiter and Venus. Without gray curls
Of cirrus or purple scud, the sky was pure
As was the chorus of fluting thrushes,
Yet the light brought the catbird a cure
And it sung its plain "meow." Sky blushes
But none now hear what my sleepwalking heard:
A catbird as sweet as a sweet mockingbird.
It is hard to find farmhands in the demented economy the Deep State has established. Every shop has a “help wanted” sign. What is an old fossil like me to do? I simply ask, and much to my surprise I got an answer. Namely a daughter and daughter in law.
If one is going to refuse to age gracefully, it sure is nice to get a little help! But then, May is a month of miracles.
What could be more Benign than soft white clouds
In May's first relenting of cold east winds,
When leaves peek from buds, and decide not to drowse
Any longer, but set sails of green goldened
That turn the twiggy woods to clouds shadeless:
Canopies of light, as if it was they
And not the sun that shone...and all distress
Is melted, or else fades so far away
It's forgotten, which strangely reminds
Of what this lost poem began about:
The soft white clouds, or was it what's Benign's?
How can mere kindness make men want to shout?
How can an ounce outweigh so many tons?
That mystery's answer is surely the sun's.
A low is parked over the Bay of Funday, wobbling away over Nova Scotia, bringing us day after day of dry, north winds. The air was dry even up over Canada, and when it is warmed thirty degrees by the high late-April sun it becomes parched. There is no shade in the woods and the duff swiftly dries in the bright sun, and the fire danger is high. The dead leaves are crisp and no longer oppressed by snow, and they swirl up and swoop down to places I already raked last fall. I clean the garden and the whipping wind messes it all up again.
I’ve tried to have a sense of humor about the wind. I bent my old back to carefully collect all the plastic tabs from last year’s plants into a plastic flowerpot, and then the pot caught the mischievous wind’s attention. The wind picked up the pot and flung it fifty feet away, scattering the plastic tabs all over the garden again. I was not amused.
I was thinking I’d skip the garden and focus on writing this year, but there’s enough worrisome news about food shortages to get me creaking about as an antiquated survivalist. I have peas planted, and enough onions, garlic and potatoes to last a winter, but the dry wind keeps causing me trouble. I laid down gardener’s fabric to repress weeds, and buried the edges with wet dirt, and then cut holes to plant the onions, but the wind dried the dirt, blew it off the fabric’s edges, and rolled up the fabric. This is not a good start. The weeds are winning even before they start growing.
Ha ha ha. That was a joke, delivered in a very grumpy tone of voice.
It’s so dry that even when below freezing at dawn there’s no frost on the car’s windshield. The wind has an annoying static and is so cold my fingers swiftly turn purple. Besides dust there is pollen in the air, and my eyes itch, and my nose is runny and chapped. So I decide I’ll let it warm up a bit more outside before gardening, and nip inside for a second coffee and a sonnet.
Reluctant spring remains frugal with joy.
Refrigerated daffodils quiver
In the keen, north wind; lilacs don't deploy
Their blooms from sullen buds; sunbeams shiver
Through bare-bone branches which are refusing
To bust out. Despite sun high as August's
I don't wear my straw hat, instead choosing
My woolen one; my nose is nipped and my trust's
As guarded as a poker player's cards.
I sneer at songbirds; they've lost their minds
And belt out hymns although the chill retards.
The spinach is smarter. The sunshine blinds
Those birds, and the buoyant bluebird's back
Reflects a blue sky full of hope that I lack.
In my grumpy mood I concluded I am short on spirituality. Bluebirds have more faith than I do. Likely it is because they don’t read the papers. I should know better, but I can never resist taking a quick peek at the news. It makes it all the harder to have faith.
Sometimes it seems I worship my worry.
My coins say, "In God We Trust", but I don't.
God, forgive me. Life flashes by; all hurry
As if our stuff will last when it won't.
God always was, is, and always will be,
But the problem is: God's not gripped by a fist.
Endlessness is too vast for eyes to see
So, in blindness, we say God can't exist
Because we can't pinch God like a penny.
Can we only worship things we can touch?
But can I touch worry? I've got many
But all in my head. Worry is a crutch
We lean upon when we're not even lame.
It's a very odd way to be playing God's game.
My thoughts are getting too heavy, so I flee back out to the simplicity of my garden.
It can’t be healthy. Every night I wake at 2:00 AM and remember all the irregularities of the last election, and am outraged all over again. I’ve learned to get up and write, for if I remain in bed I start thrashing and kicking, and disturb my wife.
In some ways I remind myself of an old, punch-drunk boxer, going on and on about how he should have been champ. In other ways I remind myself of a grieving widower, mourning the death of God’s lovely angel, Liberty. At times I think I feel how Peter must have felt after the arrest of Jesus, first rebuked for fighting, yet then shamed for running scared. At my worst and my most frustrated I grumble like one of David’s most faithful “six hundred soldiers”, when everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, and they wanted David stoned to death.
Perhaps it is good to recall David’s bleakest time. David and his men had fled the Israelites, because the paranoid King Saul wanted him dead, and he found work as a mercenary for King Achish of the Philistines, living in Ziklag and fighting three Negev tribes towards Egypt. But when the Philistines prepared to fight King Saul they did not trust David, feeling he would switch sides and support his own people in the heat of battle, so when David arrived to support King Achish, King Achish sent him back to Ziklag. In essence he had been rejected by both sides in the coming battle. But when he returned to Ziklag he found smoldering ruins, and his wives and children gone, as one of the Negev tribes, the Amalekites, had raided while he was gone. His six hundred men, grieving the loss of their own wives and children, murmured David was such a complete failure he should be stoned. You can’t get much more rock bottom than that. (To avoid leaving you in suspense: David pursued the Amalekites, caught up to them as they drunkenly celebrated their victory, and crushed them, rescuing all the women and children. [1 Samuel 30] Meanwhile Saul died fighting the Philistines to the north, so David went on to be king). Good thing David didn’t lose faith when at rock bottom.
I try to tell myself it is good to have faith tested. Faith is like a muscle that grows stronger with exercise. But exercise must be balanced with rest, and when I keep awaking at 2:00 AM I’m deficient on the rest side of the balance.
I have decided that at 2:00 AM we are at our most vulnerable. All the pep talks and prattle we utilize to keep ourselves going are asleep. But brutal reality is wide awake. And the brutal reality is: Trump won the election. Nor was it a neck-and-neck finish. He won big time, by many millions of votes. The “irregularities” were not the corrupt foibles of a few inner-city precincts, where we perhaps always expect some fraud. The “irregularities” were gigantic, and so damn obvious it physically hurts.
I think I feel most hurt by the idea so many fellow Americans don’t love their beautiful democracy. Some did not merely overlook gross distain of the law, but actually participated in the rape of decency. How could they? How could they!?
I am no King David. I am more like his troops, who were contemplating stoning their fearless leader. I thrash and kick and feel terribly unrested. I have faith goodness will triumph in the end, but less faith in my own ability to endure the wait. I am several mental states past impatience. It can’t be good for me. It can’t be healthy.
Therefore it seems wisest to drown myself in my heroin, which is work. I am thinking of plunging my tired old body into the exertion of starting a big vegetable garden. One last garden.
Even as a disgustingly strong young man of twenty-one, I’d ache when starting a garden. But back then aching was so different from aching at sixty-eight that I’m embarrassed to read whining I wrote at twenty-one, in diaries so old the pages have yellowed. When you are young the ache is all the next day. When you are old the ache is there at the start. When you are young the burn is all in muscles. When you are old arthritis stabs joints from the start, and if the joints are vertebra the pain shoots down arms and legs. Also stiffness doesn’t wait for the next day to set in; if you sit down for lunch you grunt getting up. I think it would be a very good thing for the young to be transported into an old body for a short period of time, just so they could fully appreciate how blessed they are to be young. But George Bernard Shaw stated, “Youth is wasted on the young” while I, as a youth, wrote, “Wisdom’s wasted on the old.”
Perhaps, if I want to drown myself in work, it would be wiser to face my physical limitations, and turn my garden into a lawn, and instead to focus on writing. Offer my wisdom to the young. I should spend my time working on my latest novel, “Phatty Burgers”.
The problem with that is that, in my case, “gardening”, in a literary sense, has never produced a crop I can eat. Poetry’s crop is hunger. And now, with the absurdity of cancel-culture censoring people who dare speak Truth, writing seems even less likely to produce anything but the stuff that agitates me at 2:00 AM.
I want a good night’s sleep, and therefore one last garden appeals to me.
I wish I had some servant I could delegate the work to, (a “Man Friday”, to be politically incorrect,) but I lack those gifts, (both the perfect farm-hand, and the ability to instruct and oversee). My recent attempts to delegate the gardening to others have been a yearly disaster. The garden starts out fine, but succumbs to neglect as temperatures peak, and the crop is mostly towering weeds. My best garden in the past decade was due to my being distrustful and selfish and simply saying (to myself), “Screw everyone! I’m NOT asking for help. I’m not blaming anyone but MYSELF.” Then I just got to work.
I want to do that again, one last time. If there are weeds, I get the blame. If I actually live to see a tomato get red, I’ll look to the sky and thank God.
There is something glorious about getting sweaty and dirty. Others may like bright outfits in the latest fashion, (and I too like to dress up on a Sunday), but they don’t know what they are missing when they avoid filth, and sweat, and wearing dirty jeans, and having aching muscles and joints, and holding a perfect cucumber which you yourself grew, and sweating in a sweltering kitchen to produce canning jars of excellent sauce, and going to bed exhausted, and sleeping the whole, beautifully-blessed night through.
Of course, with society so nuts, a big garden might turn out to be a life-saver next fall, and having a hundred pounds of potatoes to eat, when supermarket shelves are naked, might save my grandchildren’s lives. But that is not my real reason for one last garden.
My real reason is I want a good night’s sleep. And also, perhaps, I want a garden because I want a conscience that is cleansed, for there is something about a garden which whispers morality.
Lord, help me to ignore conspiracy.
I want to go out and garden all day.
Let me sweat. Let me get, all over me,
Dirt, and manure, and sand's grit, and clay,
And to put in some seeds, and, as they grow,
To fight weeds, and fat bugs and green worms.
Give me amnesia. I don't want to know
What the liars are lying. The returns
Of elections I cannot control,
But a small plot of earth my poor heart yearns
To govern wisely. Soothe my saddened soul,
Allowing what a liar seldom learns:
A cabbage has no brains, yet it awes
For, unlike kings, it obeys God's laws.
Weather is unfair. Some get rain and some don’t. There is nothing particularly evil about this unfairness. It is just how the Creator made creation. Sometimes you get a bumper crop, and sometimes you are lucky to get a single turnip. The politicians in Washington can legislate all they want, but they aren’t going to alter the fall of raindrops from the clouds. Prayer might work, but legislation doesn’t.
One interesting thing about droughts is that they tend to perpetuate themselves. The dryness creates hotter temperatures which deflect moisture around the periphery of the core. This is quite obvious when the drought is gigantic, as the Dust Bowl was in 1936, but even in the cases of smaller and more local droughts rain has a strange propensity to snub those who need it most.
A current drought afflicts southern Vermont and New Hampshire, along their borders with Massachusetts, and today it was uncanny how the thunderstorms, moving east to west, avoided the lands that thirsted most. There were flash flood warnings blaring from the weather radio, as we dealt with dust. Here is a radar map of rain from this afternoon.
The impressive storms south of Boston and Albany and over Springfield were moving west to east, as were the string of lesser showers to the north approaching Concord. But most irksome to me was the storm right on the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border, approaching the coast. It was a cluster that had looked hopeful as it entered Vermont in the morning, but “dried up” and vanished from the radar as it crossed over me, and only reappeared and blew up to a big thunderstorm as it neared Portsmouth on the coast. Is that fair?
I know, even as I grouse about the extra work I must do watering my plants, that it is fair. The actions and reactions of nature are not only fair, they are beautiful. They are incredible harmony, and the only reason we complain is because we are not in harmony with the harmony. We have our own specific desires that are blind. For example, I transplanted some wet, cucumber seedlings into dusty soil, and failed to immediately water them, and the next day it was too late; they had withered and watering didn’t revive them. Never in my experience have cucumber seedlings needed to be watered so immediately; this June is “A First”. However I didn’t blame the drought; I blamed my inability to adapt to the “sumptuous variety of New England weather”. The weather itself is fair; what is unfair is our responses to it.
Sunday is suppose to be a Day Of Rest, and therefore I suppose working in my garden makes me a sinner, but I tried to lessen the eventual penalty I must pay by making my work into a sort of worship. Rather than cursing the drought I was praising the Creator for the amazing variety that makes my fingerprints different from all others, and also makes every summer unique. Not that I didn’t hope for rain. I hunched my eyebrows to the west, seeking the cumulus that was building.
Storms can build up from innocent-looking cumulus with surprising speed. In fact the vast expenditure needed to create the Doppler Radar produced images which shocked the indoors meteorologists who lobbied for it, which leads me to a bit of a sidetrack.
Back in those days congress didn’t just print money when they needed it, and they told the indoors meteorologists they needed to cut their budget in some areas before they would fund the expensive Doppler Radar. So what the indoor meteorologists did was to fire hundreds of outdoors weather-observers. They figured it was worth it, for they figured Doppler Radar would allow them to track individual thunderstorms in the manner that individual hurricanes were tracked. But what the Doppler Radar revealed was that there is no such thing as “an individual thunderstorm”. A storm was a “complex” of updrafts and down-bursts, forming “cells” of various types, sometimes fighting each other and sometimes assisting each other. The Doppler Radar revealed that, rather than a swirl like a hurricane that could be tracked, a thunder storm was a pulsating blob that made dividing amoebas look dull: breaking in two or into three, or becoming mega-cells, or vanishing, in a manner which was basically impossible to predict, from indoors. What was needed was outdoors observers, but those good people had been fired to save money. It was sort of funny to watch how the indoors meteorologists tried to save face. They made it sound like they were doing the public a favor by enlisting them as “volunteer” observers, called “spotters”. A job taxpayers once payed for is now done for free, but you get what you pay for. Around here a “spotter” caused complete chaos in early June by thinking a shred of cloud was a tornado. I’d take an old-fashioned outdoors observer any day, as some had decades of experience.
A further disrespect towards the old outdoors observers involves indoors meteorologists “correcting” the records they kept. Dr. James Hanson was notorious for such fudging of facts. I think it was done to make modern “Global Warming” look worse than the murderous heat and drought of 1936, but that gets us into politics, and it is unwise to go there.
I’d do the job, if only the indoors meteorologists would get off their high horses and confess Doppler Radar only proved they were ignorant. They closed hundreds of valuable stations, run by valuable outdoor observers, to get a gadget that basically tells you a thunderstorm is bad after it already is bad. An outdoor observer can do the same. But hell if I’ll do it if the people I do the favor for behave as if they are doing me the favor. The fact of the matter is they are not God, they have no control of the weather, and it is far better to be humble in such a situation than puff your ego on a high horse.
Not that I blame them for liking Doppler Radar. It is a cool gadget. Another cool gadget tells you just when lightning bolts hit, and even when you can expect to hear the thunder. I actually like this particular gadget more than Doppler Radar, for it will inform you the moment a ordinary shower becomes a thunder shower. You can even set it to make an audible click, the moment a nearby cloud first makes a bolt. This gadget produced the map below, as the Doppler Radar produced the map above.
This is a wonderful gadget, because, when you focus in on your local area, it not only shows you where the flash you just saw, arriving in your eyes at the speed-of-light, hit he ground, but also shows you a slowly enlarging circle, expanding at the-speed-of-sound, to tell you when to expect to hear the thunder. However even this gadget has its weakness. As an outdoors observer, engrossed with worshipful weeding of my garden on Sunday, I noticed I was hearing thunder this gadget didn’t admit existed.
The reason I could hear such thunder was obvious to me, although I am no Sherlock Holmes. Not all lightning hits the ground, but such lightning makes thunder. A storm can shoot bolts cloud to cloud, ten or even twenty miles from it’s core. Soft, cloud-to-cloud thunder can be heard by outside observers like me, even when gadgets are deaf.
I was in some ways glad it didn’t rain, as I had to weed the beans, and you can’t weed beans in a wet situation because doing so causes problems with a virus attacking the bean’s leaves. (No, it is not the Corona Virus and no, you don’t need to wear a mask. You simply weed when the leaves are dry).
Although drought may be good for beans when you weed them, after weeding they thirst for water. I had to water some flats of seedlings I intend to soon transplant, even as soft thunder muttered from both the north and south. The carrots and tomatoes were crying out for weeding, but I had to water first. It isn’t fair, but is just is how things are. And I eventually did weed some carrots and all the tomatoes, and also the peppers, as daylight faded and you actually could see the lightning to the north and the lightning to the south, which went along with the soft sky thunder. Yet still we remained dry.
As the late day June sun settled and the mosquitoes came out I decided enough worship was enough, and headed to my front stoop to relax with a worshipful beer. And it was then I felt I became a most blessed outdoors observer. I was witnessing stuff Doppler Radar misses.
Some storm to the south was a little closer than the others. The thunder was still soft, but a few flashes of lightning seemed brighter. And then I noticed, against slow moving higher clouds, speeding scud.
There was hardly a draft down where I sat, but the outflow of distant storms produced a wind, around a thousand feet up, of marvelous speed. (I can’t recall ever seeing scud moving so fast, outside of hurricanes). With an imagination like mine it was easy to see an angel on a speeding horse.
What this outflow did was to uplift a local cloud just enough to make it shower. At first it was just a few big drops, platting here or there, but then it became a soft roar in the crisp June foliage of parched trees, at first far away like a whisper, but then edging and sidling closer, until a brief down-burst hit the stoop I hearkened from.
In India they celebrate a monsoon’s first rain. The evening chorus of songbirds hushed at the approach of a downpour in a drought. It began as a sigh on the very edge of hearing, but became an approaching roar. All became giddy in a way only drought knows. My wife came out and stood beside me as the flooding baptism approached, and then began splatting fat, warm droplets down in a way that raised tiny clouds of the dust it pelted. And then all too soon the sigh faded away through the darkening trees. I looked up through parting clouds and saw the high heavens feathered with sunset’s crimson cirrus.
Through parched trees comes the sigh of marching rain, And even evening birds bow heads, made mute With gratitude. The drenched do not complain For it’s been so dry that sunbeams refute Green growing, and, as first fat drops pelt The dirt, small puffs of dust are arising, And now the sigh surrounds. I once felt This way when a kiss brought a surprising End to loneliness. But this shower’s brief And already the soft sigh slides away Through dimming evening; sweet mercy’s relief Fades to memory’s grief, and dripping leaves pray The way men pray when they confess they lack: “Oh Lord, come back. Come back. Come back.”
************
P.S.
On Monday we got a mini-monsoon. The heat encouraged a general updraft to form a weak low over southern Maine, which sucked cool and moist maritime air inland and then south towards us, where it clashed with muggy air. At first the showers continued to dry up, as radar showed them approaching, but thunder thumped all around, and finally we got a few more showers. Around sixty miles to our south one locale got four inches and suffered wash-outs, but for the most part we dripped in a delightful summer drizzle. Who would ever think I could delight in drizzle?
People who want to garden for pleasure should make certain to keep their gardens small. The smaller the better. I recommend a single planter. Otherwise gardening is more like jogging five miles in the morning: When you face the hill at Mile-Three you question your own sanity.
There will be, of course, the exultation. That is what runners call a “second wind”, but, before that “second wind” comes, one sees their mind fill up with quarreling, as if a buck private was screaming back at the screaming sergeant at boot camp, or even like a patient picking up a knife to defend himself from a surgeon approaching with a scalpel. It is such a mental ruckus that its occurrence mystifies all those who have idealized ideas about gardening.
In fact many who begin “gardening for pleasure” in April abandon the enterprise as a bad idea by June, and by July they are getting nagged by bureaucrats on the local zoning board for their patch of towering weeds. Be forewarned.
To me the actual pleasure of a big garden involves a more fundamental and ancient joy, called “avoiding starvation”. It has been 400 years since my first European ancestors stepped onto these shores, and the first 300 years saw most Americans rooted to the soil, living lives that made it very obvious that if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat. There was no real escape; if you went broke you didn’t receive welfare; you went to the “poor farm” and went on working.
Currently our society is going through a period of confusion wherein many think they can, like ticks and leeches, suck off the lifeblood of others. Not merely the poor man on the dole; but the wealthy politician profiting from other’s taxes; the slippery investor on Wall Street; and even the retiree collecting an oversized pension, may be attempting to reap more than they sowed. This is bound to create resentment among those who reap less than they sow. The spectacle of a bloated Union Boss driving a fancy car and wearing pinkie rings, as the worker on the factory floor he represents pays dues and wears pants with frayed cuffs, does not inspire confidence, or even the desire to work harder. If anything it suggests laziness pays, and inspires sloth.
It is good to escape this confusion into the more real world of a vegetable garden. It is a reality which persists even when it is easier and cheaper to buy food at a market. And, if the societal breakdown ever collapses to a degree wherein the shelves are empty in the markets, perhaps the connection to the ancient joy of survival will be less of a mere concept, and more real. Money is worthless if the markets are empty, whereas dirt has value when it holds potatoes.
However, in the rush to finish spring planting in June, the “joy” is most definitely unapparent. It is then one is most like a jogger approaching a steep hill, muttering to himself, “Why do I do this? Jogging is STUPID!”
Perhaps the most difficult moment is arising from bed in the morning. The physical work involved in small-scale gardening made me achy even as a young man, and as I approach age seventy the pain seems more constant; I never seem able to “get in shape”. Also I seem to work in slow motion. I spend far more time leaning on my hoe than actually using it. Not that anyone is going to want to hear the violins of my self pity. They’ll just affirm the voice in my own head: “Why do you garden? Gardening is STUPID”.
Rather than whine to others, I turn to the blues, and try to make sonnets of my grouching:
. FIRST COFFEE SONNET
Who knows if songbirds are ambivalent When they first awake? Who fathoms bird brains? Perhaps they need some bird-equivalent Of coffee, before cascading refrains Of music fill our forests. Perhaps…perhaps… I hate to think of birds as superior To a poet, yet dawn’s a complete collapse Of my morale, and I’m inferior To birds, before my first cup of coffee. I glower at pert birds; call each a twit; Resent their singing. They seem to scoff me As I drag to the pot with zero wit And the only thing I’m able to praise Is the coffee inthis cup I now raise.
. FIRST ASPIRIN SONNET
All I get from gardening is my lame grunts As I rise in the morning. Pathetic! I feel I won’t survive the few hot months Before harvest. Reward? Others will get it. My harvest’s to limp to, (before coffee), My aspirin bottle…and guilt, as before Coffee and pills God should look down and see Me at prayer. I guess, with my limbs sore, I could pray for a morning that’s pain-free; For mercy, and miraculous healings, And dirt with no big rocks as I spade it; Yet I suppose that might hurt God’s feelings. I should thank Him life’s just how He made it: Old men plant saplings, although they won’t see The apples that some day will hang from the tree.
This is not to say that, after aspirin and coffee, old gardeners can’t find joy in new gardens. There is the joy of old efforts from prior years; the rhubarb and asparagus that spring up without my raising a finger, from old roots. And there is the first handful of flat snow peas, small servings at dinner twice as delectable as any store’s, and all the more delectable because I beat other local gardeners by two weeks, and harvested first. And then there’s the faithful old standby, so good for children as it can be harvested in a mere twenty days, the radish.
What could be fresh and new about a radish? Glad you asked. I can recall growing radishes as a rugrat back in the 1950’s, yet in all these years I never knew you could eat the greens. Last night I had a mess of delicious radish greens fried up in olive oil with garlic, which goes to show you every spring hold’s something new, and also that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
For example, strips of black plastic make for less weeding between potatoes during July heatwaves. Black plastic may be ugly, newfangled stuff, and likely screws up the ecology of soil chemistry in some unforeseen way, but old men are allowed to resort to cheap tricks to avoid bending their creaky backs….I think…
There is nothing quite so discouraging as to attempt to share a joy, and to fail. When a comedian tells a joke before a crowd and no one laughs; it is called “bombing out”. Or when a preacher attempts to … Continue reading →
Sunrise's Swansong 