bright cold
A luminous early morning – clouds break up; sun breaks through,
bright and beaming – hope. It hurts my eyes.
I water our young trees again, though it’s barely above freezing. My
wet hands hurt from the cold, but it’s done.
red-bellied morning
Everything – clouds, ground, walls – glows red before the sun comes up. Black branches scrape the sky like claws. But a few minutes
later the red fades. The anger dissipates into gray resignation, then brightening (faint) hope.
It warms up enough again today that I finally give in to the gardening urge. I dig up a few weeds, clean the birdbaths, and wait for real cold.
bottle-blue beads
Another unusually warm day, a sunny afternoon, but I feel unsettled.
Mentally, I’m ready to hunker down indoors, and stop working the
garden, but as long as it’s not frozen, and not covered up with snow,
it nags me. A weed (actually, lots of them) here, a bed to be
tended there.
Instead, I sit and watch the flowers. A few haggard mums hang on, prop
each other up – a dirty sundress that should have been cut into rags
long ago. Last-minute bees browse the clearance racks, looking for
deals, clinging to every drop of nectar they find. Flies come, too,
picking over the remainders. Their bottle-blue backs shine like bright
beads in the faded yellow glory of flowers.
hard frost
Finally, the inevitable drop into the low 20s. The garden is finished… but not quite. Without rain the past few weeks, our young trees could use a last drink before the ground freezes. So I spend an hour or two with them, and we spread leaves and composted manure under the asparagus and raspberries, around the rhubarb.
The garden seems so small now, wilted, shrunken to stems. A few weeks ago it had seemed so crowded, so full, so complete. Now I see there is so much more that could have been done, so much that could still be done, so much to do. Too much.
We bring our remaining leeks indoors, in a bucket of dirt, and I dream of the perfect cold frame. Maybe this weekend I will build one.
old beets
When we were cleaning up the cold-killed tomatoes, Jenny discovered some beets that had been growing in the garden since spring. They had been shaded by the tomatoes, so hadn’t gotten too large or woody, so today we ate them, boiled, cooled and chopped on a bed of our own salad greens.
I noticed right away they tasted older, but in a good way, like wine – a deeper, more mature, subtler flavor than the beets we harvested in early summer. I could taste our own garden in it – our soil, heavy with clay, a little smoky… the air above it, woodsy and moist… on the edge of wild weeds, garlic mustard, dandelion, pushing over each other to come in.
