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February 25, 2008

Dear Ones,

The last weeks of winter aren’t as bleak for gardeners as they are for, say, commuters and the depressed (endless) or skiers (sodden) or arthritics (achy). Martha Stewart is talking about dibbles and soil this month. It’s seed catalog season. In Virginia, where I was last a full-blown organic gardener, St. Patrick’s Day signals the beginning of the planting season. So right now I’d be waiting for my seed potatoes and pea seeds to arrive. They’re the first to go in—as soon as the soil dries out enough to turn. I’d have one eye on the asparagus patch and the other on the rhubarb, both harbingers of spring and worth the trot down to the garden to scan for the first bit of green this time of year. It’s all about hope. And patience. And memories.

The pleasures of living close to the earth are all the sweeter for the wait. Nothing in the grocery store compares, ever again, to the first meals from your baby green garden in the early spring. Pea pods and kale and broccoli and the first leaves of four or six (or ten or twelve) varieties of lettuce, all colors and shapes, are the pure delightful taste of sun and earth. The day you first plunge your hand into a mound of leaf-shaded soil and pull out a tiny red potato, you are spoiled forever. On this morning between days of gray skies and “icy mix” I can make myself drool thinking of that first spring meal of new potatoes with butter and fresh dill, crisp bright green baby asparagus stalks, barely-steamed snap peas and a mess of dressed mesclun greens. And for dessert—strawberry-rhubarb pie. With cream whipped right on the spot.

Just the thought of that meal is enough to keep you going through the mud season, as endless as it may seem, into the season of buds and blossoms. And nothing in the produce section at Stop-and-Shop will tempt you in the meantime. The sun and air and earth and water that pop in your mouth on picking day in Chile or California are all but lost to weeks spent rolling down the fossil fuel road, stacked in waxed boxes in the back of the store, spritzed and floresced in the refrigerated display case.

For Christmas Nancy gave me an urban backyard “Tumbleweed” composter, a little life-maker. I’ve been feeding it scraps all winter: coffee grounds and filters, stems and leaves from cooking and pruning and raking, eggshells, orange skins and winter squash rinds. I give it a spin on its pivot whenever I’m out the back with Keeper or the moon. When the spring sun hits it and I start adding grass clippings with their nitrogenous heat, it won’t be long before it all turns back to earth. That’s where the magic begins. Just around the corner, no matter the season, there is something new, a round red, crisp green, warm dark creative harbinger of hope. Hang onto that, friends. Hang onto that.

Earthly,

margie

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