Seeding

In late February or early March, when the snow has melted but the ground is still frozen, I’m going to scatter a mix of red clover and bird’s-foot trefoil seed over the pasture. This is called frost seeding.
               
It sounds like a way to sow ice crystals, or a version of the biblical proverb about seed falling on stony ground. But as the frost relents, the ground expands and contracts and expands again, and the seeds will work their way down into the soil, where they germinate. It’s an old idea, as old as the weeds along the tree line. Even now the snow is flecked with hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of weed seeds, all waiting for that slow melting ride down to the ground. (205) 

~ Verlyn Klinkenborg The Rural Life

Somehow, the notion of frost seeding resonates with me. In fact, I have strewn seeds to the hands of fate once or twice myself, wildflowers and packets too old to plant with confidence, an act of random kindness done as prayer or repentance with hopeful abandon. You too might find inspiration in one of my children's favorite picture books, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney. And, who doesn't love lupines?

Today is the vernal equinox, and spring has arrived gently to fully seed the senses. Seeding time is well at hand. The year's seed catalogs perused, the orders placed, and the preparations well underway. I will need to wait until we've made our final move to our new home in late spring, but I will get my hands dirty. I am giddy with anticipation and chomping at the bit, but I will be patient. All in good time and better late than never as they say. 

In the meantime, I have been rejoicing in images from the deserts of California, experiencing a super bloom after years of drought ended in the long, soaking rains throughout the winter. The seeds were lying dormant, waiting decades even centuries, and now bloom to blanket the landscape in color. The event is so rare, beautiful and unexpected that visitors are coming from all over the world to see what for many will be a once in a lifetime event. 

The seed's ability to survive deprivation and still bloom in all its glory may be just the lesson I need this first Monday of spring as I ask myself about the seeds still dormant and waiting to bloom in me. We plant seeds all the time in the people we encounter, in relationship with other from the most intimate to the most brief and tangential. 50 years has given others plenty of time for seeding in me, and I am feeling the urgency to do so more in others as well.

What seeds do I still hope to see bloom in my life? What seeds do I most desire to plant in others? What seeds can I collect and sort and package to pass onto my girls? What seeds can we scatter in the field and in the world at large, randomly or with plan and purpose, to insure the welfare of the greater good from the most concrete and proximal to those far and wide and deep and distant? Do I recognize a seed when I see it? Do I recognize seed containers and vessels and packets and acknowledge that something exceptional rests inside?

Today, I am seeding in action and thought, pondering the possibility of new growth and the power contained beneath a tiny shell in hopes that my senses awaken and efforts flower and bear fruit. If you join me, think of the garden we will plant and all we can feed. Just a suggestion. Just planting a seed. 

In Memoriam

Dear Grandma Mary,

I wish I had written this letter to you earlier, before your mind betrayed you. Of course, dementia would have wiped away these words from your memory long ago, but I know they need to be said even though you have now passed on and left me without an audience. Despite being long overdue and true to form, I am writing this belated note of gratitude to you today with deep sincerity and send it out into the universe as acknowledgement of my good fortune.

I met my husband almost 25 years ago now, and I continue to be reminded on a regular basis of the hand you played in raising your grandson into the wonderful man he became. I am not talking about aspects of his outstanding character that certainly reflect your example. Rather, I am talking about the way he helps to make our house a home through the simplest of actions and underlying values.

More than anything, you taught Jim that a penny saved is a penny earned. In fact, he never fails to miss a penny tossed carelessly on the sidewalk and overlooked by most. Once picked up, he rubs it between his fingers and places it in his pocket, lauding your name and his good luck. These pennies are collected in a large glass jar in our home, where art imitates life as a symbol of the hard work and smart investment over the years that brought us from our days of $20 in reserves to a life of comfort and privilege. I know you did the same rising up from the Great Depression and WWII on a postman's salary and pension, and so appreciate your example.

You also taught your grandson the value of a safe and secure home, one with time and space to watch a baseball game late in the afternoon to beat the summer heat. And, in turn, Jim taught me the merits of a long afternoon nap when you sleep deep after a weary week and emerge from beneath the covers renewed, feeling better than you can remember in every cell of your body from head to toe. In the midst of a full and demanding life, the virtues of such moments of repose cannot be emphasized and appreciated enough as they show caring for the self and one another in full measure.

Practically speaking, you taught your grandson how to clean and clean well. Those Saturdays you spent vacuuming, tasking him with moving beds for you and lifting couches to get at the cobwebs and defeat the dust, may be the greatest gift you ever gave me. His full professional life precludes its frequency, but when Jim cleans, he cleans through and through. When the tedium of housework gets to be too much or the neglect becomes too overwhelming, I can count on him to step up and do it right.

When it comes to my wheelhouse, the kitchen, you taught Jim how to appreciate food, straightforward and unadorned but delicious. Your rolls and applesauce are an eternal source of inspiration which elevate the taste buds to new heights with butter and homemade jam or a bit of cinnamon and brown sugar. Your love of chocolate was legendary and one of the major food groups on which you subsisted the last twenty years of your life. Since you lived to be 96, I know I will follow your example. Of course, you did let Jim eat cookies and milk for breakfast at times, but I am willing to overlook such an indiscretion in light of the virtues of the larger culinary picture.

In fact, cookies and milk for breakfast simply reflect your lighter side. I will never fail to remember experiences between Grandmother and Grandson that repeatedly evoke the most cathartic of belly laughs whether behind the wheel for the first time in a muddy apple orchard or sitting as passenger in the back seat, struggling with cadence and emphasis in the English language. And, you never failed to lend a helping hand to family, friends, and neighbors as long as you could, even acquiring a postal run of your very own late in life to bring cheer to many in your retirement home.

You live on in Jim's quick wit and loving ways, his work ethic and helping hand, and I couldn't be more grateful. I believe that we are passing some of these things onto our children in honor of your legacy. Please know your efforts, and I know it wasn't always easy, have not gone unnoticed from someone grateful to have joined the ride.

Peace and love to you.
XOXO

Springing

Spring never fails to surprise and delight. Every year it is an awakening, getting reacquainted with nature. I seem to hitch a ride on the tide of all that is new and renew commitments to creativity and health, home as well as the unknown lands, inside and out, and community.

Living in a new college town in a new state, spring has come earlier than I have ever experienced and even to everyone's surprise (and underlying dismay and concern) here. We seem to have finally landed on a new home that we love and the coming months will be full to bursting. Yet, my seasonal work at the university is winding down and I want to return to my writing and blogging and see where it takes me in the coming months.

I will embrace the process and the journey once again. So, I am springing forth in my step, into the world, in anticipation of the the new and unexpected, into the season. Join me for a bit of inspiration now and again, won't you?

Winter, Spring

Jim Harrison

Winter is black and beige down here
from drought. Suddenly in March
there’s a good rain and in a coup1e
of weeks we are enveloped in green.
Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks,
cottonwoods, the bowers of thick
willow bushes the warblers love
for reasons of food or the branches,
the tiny aphids they cat with relish.

Each year it is a surprise
that the world can turn green again.
It is the grandest surprise in life,
the birds coming back from the south to my open
arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.