Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [23]
On the new edge of springtime when I stand on the front porch shading my eyes from the weak morning light, sniffing out a tinge of green on the hill and the scent of yawning earthworms, oh, boy, then! I roll like a bear out of hibernation. The maple buds glow pink, the forsythia breaks into its bright yellow aria. These are the days when we can’t keep ourselves indoors around here, any more than we believe what our eyes keep telling us about the surrounding land, i.e., that it is still a giant mud puddle, now lacking its protective covering of ice. So it comes to pass that one pair of boots after another run outdoors and come back mud-caked—more shoes than we even knew we had in the house, proliferating like wild portobellos in a composty heap by the front door. So what? Noah’s kids would have felt like this when the flood had almost dried up: muddy boots be hanged. Come the end of the dark days, I am more than joyful. I’m nuts.
Our household was a week into high spring fever when Lily and I decided it was safe to carry out some of the seedlings we’d started indoors on homemade shelves under fluorescent bulbs. The idea of eating from our home ground for a year had moved us to start a grocery store from seed. We’d been tucking tomatoes into seed flats since January, proceeding on to the leafy greens and broccoli, the eggplants, peppers, okra, and some seed catalog mysteries we just had to try: rock melons, balloon flowers! By mid-March our seed-starting shelves were overwhelmed.
Then began the lover’s game we play with that irresistible rascal partner, March weather. He lulls us into trust one day with smiles and sunshine and daytime highs in the sixties, only to smack us down that very night with a hard freeze. On our farm we have a small unheated greenhouse that serves as a halfway house, a battered-seedling shelter if you will, where the little greenlings can enjoy the sun but are buffered from cold nights by five degrees or so. Usually that’s enough of a safety margin. But then will come a drear night when the radio intones, Lows tonight in the teens, and we run to carry everything back inside, dashing in the back door, setting flats all over the table and counters until our kitchen looks like the gullet and tonsils of a Chia Pet whale.
This is what’s cruel about springtime: no matter how it treats you, you can’t stop loving it. If the calendar says it’s the first day of spring, it is. Lily and I had been lured up the garden path, literally, carrying flats of broccoli, spinach, and cilantro seedlings to the greenhouse on the bank just uphill from the house.
The greatest rewards of living in an old farmhouse are the stories and the gardens, if they’re still intact in any form. We are lucky enough to have both. The banks all around us are crowded with flowering shrubs and hummocks of perennial bulbs that never fail to please and startle us, like old friends leaping from behind the furniture to yell, “Surprise!” These flowers are gifts from a previous century, a previous dweller here—a tale, told in flowers, of one farm wife’s fondness for beauty and this place. In a few more months we’d be drunk on the scent of Lizzie Webb’s mock oranges and lilacs, but the show begins modestly in April with her tiny Lenten roses, white-petaled snowdrops, and the wildish little daffodils called jonquils that have naturalized all over the grassy slopes. As Lily and I walked single file up the path to the greenhouse, I noticed these were up, poking their snub, yellow-tipped noses through a fringe of leaves.
“Oh, Mama,” Lily cried, “look what’s about to bloom—the tranquils.”
There went the last of the needles of ice around my heart, and I understood I’d be doomed to calling the jonquils tranquils for the rest of my days. Lily is my youngest. Maybe you know how