Busy Signal
Why do the multiflora roses have to smell so heavenly? Pruners in hand, the morning walks have become a conflicted trespass of beauty mingled with unfortunate purpose as I try to ease the thorny burden on our newest maple, shagbark hickory and oak saplings. I’ve heard the laughter of brambles before—a deep and derisive shrillness—and still I trudge on with my agenda amidst the echoes of futility. Perhaps, akin to the starfish on the beach story, it matters to this one (tiny red maple, brave little oak, innocent shagbark hickory).
Please forgive the gap in reflections (has it really been two months since I put my fingers to the keyboard?); I’ve been outside on my knees in the garden, mulching, hilling up the potatoes, running my fingers through the tender leaves of this year’s first radish crop (five varieties!) and slowly shrinking the pile of wood chips that our nieces hauled and offloaded next to the raised beds, spreading it on the narrow paths that wind their way through our future groceries. I have plans for refinements to the whole enterprise—reinforcing the south side of the bean and vining tomato trellises with welded wire fencing, filling in the trenches that Patrick dug for potatoes and closing off that area with the remaining wood pallets currently leaning up against one of the more established mulberry trees. It’s good and honest work that will probably take the better part of a morning and I’m up for it, thanks to a good massage therapist and a most pleasant bathtub that makes me forget those knots in my shoulders.
A while back, I mused about tending to living things as a remedy for the frightening State of Affairs that currently engulfs us all and it’s working, like a couple of Tylenol taking the edge off a pounding headache. A church up the road is holding its annual “yard giveaway”, accepting donations of anything and everything that folks can pick through at their leisure on a sunny Saturday. Our barn will gladly give up its detritus to this cause, finding new homes for three antique school desks, half a dozen wicker lawn chairs, a woodchipper in need of a carburetor, a white farmhouse tables and miscellaneous light fixtures. I fully expect to hear the whole structure exhale as it watches the truck disappear down the driveway, it’s tottering pile of memories wobbling precariously over the ruts and potholes left by the last round of soaking rains. We’ll stop for ice cream on the way back home, sitting on the tailgate like a couple of dating teenagers.
We’ve been busy since we arrived here twenty-six years ago and for as long as the land keeps asking for our time and muscle and effort, we’ll gladly oblige. What the seasons give us is more than ample compensation; it is, in fact, a sacred contract of trust and good medicine in both directions. For the next three months, the trees on the ridge will wrap their leafy arms around us protectively as our flock of orioles, in their smart orange and black tuxedos, play hide-and-seek between sips at the jelly juice feeders. We need only sit on the couch and be delighted; they ask nothing else from us. A mama raccoon tidies up the area below the seed feeders around 6:30pm each evening and we expect to see her young-uns in tow before too long. If you’ve not had the opportunity to observe any animal showing its offspring how to survive, you’re in for a treat and may never watch TV again. Living things saving us from ourselves once more.
In a couple hours, I’ll walk down the driveway to trim back the honeysuckles that want so badly to scratch the sides of our cars and have the weed whip in the other hand to lay down the hip-high saw grass and bedstraw threatening to tunnel us in forever. Maybe I’ll catch a glimpse of the stunning pileated woodpecker who frequents the grove of buckeyes that hug the creek banks and he’ll let me just gaze upon him in awe and appreciation. I don’t want to be greedy (feeling small as I stand beneath towering cottonwoods is enough, truly) but it’s no crime to hope, is it? In three weeks, the branches of nearly all our mulberries will be loaded with fruit and we’ll shake them loose onto a sheet spread out on the grass below while one of us tries to remember that recipe for mulberry barbeque sauce our niece gave us five years ago.
It’s my best intention to sit here on the couch a week from now and unspool another collection of thoughts but if that doesn’t happen, at least you’ll know what I’m up to.
