CRICKS, CRAWDADS, COWS, AND CORNFIELDS
I am trying to tell him why I don’t mind summers that are hot and humid. He’s sweating, big red handkerchief smacking his forehead, just waiting for me to propose, “Let’s quit trying to move this mulch and go inside where it’s cool.” Instead, I say, “This reminds me of Indiana.” He says, “But you couldn’t live there, right?” I answer, “No, I couldn’t, but I did.”
I moved to Indiana, a child of eleven, but already different. I played football, not the kind with a flag where you didn’t get dirty or possibly hurt, but the kind where you tackled, had body contact, might get hurt, most certainly got dirty. My toys were stuffed animals, tin soldiers, cars of all kinds. I hated dolls. If a misguided adult gave me a doll, I immediately ripped it open to see what it was made of.
I had a lightweight English bicycle that I could ride fast; the other girls in this new small town had heavy fat-wheeled American Schwinns that lumbered up hills and could not be lifted over obstacles. I had a Canadian accent, hair that could not be tamed, loved school, and wore boys’ shorts. I was already queer, though I didn’t know it. They did, and they shunned me.
With time on my hands that first summer after we moved and alone, I discovered cricks and crawdads, cornfields and cows. Our new house was bordered in the back by an open field owned by the American Legion but rented to a local farmer. Standing at the kitchen sink looking out the window in the late afternoon, I could watch the procession of cows as they made their way across the field, heading home for milking. I had never seen cows before. I loved their little ears, too tiny for such big bodies, and their huge brown eyes that seemed to jump off their face as they looked at me. I thought they were beautiful.
An old-fashioned man named Pleasant Lee Powell lived next door. He grew a long white beard and wore pants held up by suspenders. He also grew corn and tomatoes and squash. We bought his corn and tomatoes and squash. I discovered green worms and soft cornsilk. I killed the worms and saved the cornsilk. In Canada, my friends and I had made “cigarettes” out of toilet paper and pine needles. In Indiana, I bought myself a corncob pipe at the dime store, paid for by money I made from my first job—mowing Pleasant Lee’s lawn. I stuffed the pipe with dried cornsilk, and puffed away, hidden from view of my parents by the huge grape arbor that took up half our backyard.
On the way to school that first year, I had crossed over Hurricane Creek, going and coming each day. In the spring it went wild and flooded its banks, but in the summer it was calm and clear. I loved to wade in the creek on a hot July day, to feel the water-washed stones under my feet, to poke in the mud for anything that might be alive. In this creek, which I soon learned to call a “crick,” were crawdads, tiny creatures that looked a bit like lobsters. I loved to catch them, look at them, then put them back in the water, and watch them swim away. I learned to look out for the junk people threw off the bridge, particularly the tin cans with lids that could cut a foot. I swore that I would never mess up a creek that way.
There were no alleys in my urban Canadian neighborhood. Every block in my small new Indiana town was bisected by alleys. In the alleys I could ride my bike as fast as my legs would let me, the wind cooling me down from the August heat. There I discovered the hollyhocks and sunflowers that sprang up along untended back fences. Their wild beauty aroused my sense of joy. Such color of blossom, such vigor of stem, such enthusiastic self-promotion. Nobody paid attention to them; some even called them weeds, yet they survived and flourished.
“So, yes,” I tell him, as I pick up the pitchfork and load another wheelbarrow with mulch, “I like hot and humid. Sweating, searching for every bit of breeze, I am once again a kid watching cows, mowing lawns, smoking cornsilk, wading in the crick, cycling through back alleys, knowing I will survive and even flourish.”
STUCK
Stuck, stuck, stuck, I am stuck inside. I have been stuck inside for two and a half days. Our snow-blowing service failed to show up yesterday or the day before to clear the driveway; they called to say they would get to us tomorrow. The snow is too deep now for Sara and me to shovel our way out, and besides, it is still snowing. I am stuck.
It is time to cut forsythia branches and bring them inside for winter forcing. I crave that delicate flush of yellow that happens on a February morning when the forsythia breaks bud in a vase on the kitchen counter. To get this pleasure I must get out now. I cannot get out now, but even if I could, the bushes, planted along the street, are buried under walls of snow made by the town plow as it clears the roads. The forsythia will recover from anything a snowplow can do, but what about the Pieris japonica, “Brower’s Beauty,” that provide the foundation plantings for the front of our house? They get their spring buds in the fall, beautiful branches of brick-colored buds that match the brick of the house. I need to get the snow off them, now, or their branches will crack under the weight of the snow and I will lose my winter “welcome home” delight. But how? I can’t get out.
I look out the window and the landscape is stuck too. Nothing is happening. After most January snows, I look out on a landscape marked by motion. Animal tracks cross and re-cross, others go around in circles, sometimes there are holes and beds, clearings where the deer have slept. But today there is not a track to be seen. No deer crossed the lawn last night looking to chew on a tasty shrub. They must be stuck, too, for they have not come to eat the clethra or itea or the hemlocks or the young witch hazels, unprotected since the deer fence around them collapsed under the weight of the snow. The ground underneath the Callery pear, usually scrabbled by squirrels looking for the tiny pears, is as smooth as a cake newly frosted with boiled sugar icing.
The euonymous remain buried. Where is the rabbit, I wonder, who after an ordinary snowfall will carefully hop to where one of these shrubs is planted, paw away the snow from around the stem and leaves, and eat it? Such an insistence on preference in the midst of hard times, and from a rabbit, never ceases to amaze me. But now I realize I have not seen the rabbit since the snows began. She must be trapped in her nest beneath my deck. Will she die if she can’t get out? I worry. When I share my concern with Sara, she reminds me that in the summer, when this same rabbit and her many offspring are stripping my garden, I regret that she’s alive. Today I would give anything to see her footprints heading across the deck and towards a euonymous. It would at least be a sign of life.
But there is no life, just snow, snow, snow, and more snow, everything frozen, everything stuck. Now that there is no motion, I realize how much I prize movement in the winter garden. Today, I’d be happy to see a deer track or have a squirrel break the perfection of the frosted cake. I look at the line of winterberry bushes along the back fence and long for that moment in February when birds suddenly swarm and in a matter of minutes clear off all the berries. Today I notice that the berries have turned black. Perhaps they are no longer any good as bird food, perhaps this year I will not see the sudden swarming of black birds against red berries.
I wonder if robins will reappear this year, as they once did, literally out of the blue, to cover my crabapple tree and rip off the tiny fruits, dropping as many on the ground as they crammed into their beaks, and disappearing as quickly as they came? Will anything ever again happen in my winter garden?
Sara has finally come down from her study for tea. We sit in the sunroom and talk and look out at the frozen landscape. Suddenly we are both alert, we have both sensed motion. Something is moving outside. Can it be what we think? Yes, it must be, look at that tail, look at that color, look at that trot. It is a fox, and the fox is jumping up and down in the snow, then trotting around in circles, then jumping up and down again, a miracle of motion and color. Hunting, or just having fun? We don’t know, we don’t care, because finally, something is happening.
TEMPTATION
When I was a teenager, I sang in my church choir: “Yield not to temptation for yielding is sin.” I knew temptation—her name was Constance Joy—and, alas, I did not yield. In the garden now I yield and yield again. The fuzzy softness of a lamb’s ear leaf, the touch on my cheek of a newly emerging miscanthus frond, the smell on my hands as I rub them over the lavender, the sound in winter of the dried seed pods on my baptisia moving in the wind—all these tangle me in a net of sensual pleasure and I succumb, gladly.
In winter, reading catalogues promoting the tried and true and the exciting and new, I indulge my passion without the distractions of planting and weeding. Ensconced on a January evening in my favorite chair in front of the fire, with the latest garden catalogue open on my lap and Tanner, my cat, beside me, I read about the latest hellebore from White Flower Farms: “A stunning, true slate-colored variety that comes out of our extensive breeding work. Extravagant, haunting black blossoms are composed of nicely rounded, cupped petals that reveal just a peek of a light silver sheen underneath. Just envision these blooms among a dusting of pure white snow.” Well, yes, indeed, if I can stop panting long enough to look outside and envision.
Here is how Wayside Gardens entices me to want Penstemon barbatus ‘Rubycunda.’ “Rows of large, dangling scarlet bells with pure white throats, held well above the bright green foliage, entice hummingbirds and bees into the sunny garden.” It had occurred to me that a few more penstemons would not be amiss, but now I am determined to have ‘Rubycunda.’
I am not alone in my lust, however, and I come by it honestly. As a child I asked my grandmother to tell me why my mother refused to plant astrantia. Instead of answering, she drifted away, her eyes growing misty. “Astrantia,” she murmured, caressing the sound as if it were the name of a lost lover. “I remember my very first. She was a deep deep red ” and then she was gone into a private reverie of remembered conquests and passionate embraces.
No gardener wrote the Hebrew bible. No gardener would ever suggest that a garden is a place of innocence. If a gardener, say a woman, had written Genesis, the story would have been different. Working in her garden one evening, Eve encounters the Devil. He is carrying a small tree and smiling broadly. “Eve,” he says, “have I got a plant for you! Look at this.” And he would show her the world’s first crabapple and read her what it says on the tag: “Guaranteed to be upright and vase-shaped, only 15 feet. Pale pink buds open to delicately scented pure white flowers in late spring. Clusters of small glossy red fruits persist until late winter and attract songbirds. Disease and pest resistant too.” And he would add that the foliage turns brilliant red-orange in the fall, and, by the way, no one else in the neighborhood has one. Eve would not hesitate to yield to this temptation; she had already succumbed to a paperbark maple and a columnar sweetgum from other plantsmen. Nothing would keep her from adding Malus ‘Adirondack’ to her garden.
I have seen it happen, though, I’ve seen lust turn to greed. I have watched as one person at a plant sale pushes through the crowd, grabs the entire flat of a “new” astilbe, and carries them off, deaf to the cries of outrage around them. I have seen a stampede brought on by tree peonies on sale for twenty dollars. I have witnessed a late arriving shopper, disappointed that all the Sinocalycanthus raulstonii ‘Heritage Wine’ are already gone, snatch one from another shopper’s holding area and cart it off to buy.
Sometimes, when I have placed my order to Wayside Gardens for all the new penstemons or come home from Faddegon’s with three rare and expensive dwarf conifers instead of one, I feel a sickening sensation in the pit of my stomach and an inner voice remonstrates, “Greedy, that’s what you are, greedy. You don’t need all those plants, you can’t take care of all those plants, you have no place for all those plants, IT IS TOO MUCH.” Occasionally, the voice gets me to return a plant or two on the spot. Mostly, though, I just snap back, “Having too many plants doesn’t hurt anyone. Besides I deserve every plant I have. I know their names.”
This year I have sworn to be more moderate. I may even skip the Berkshire Botanical Garden’s plant sale! But as the spring catalogues arrive, I am tempted. In fact, I just added astrantia to my Bluestone order. I have never grown one before. Don’t you think I owe it to Grandma to try?
Judith Fetterley lives, writes, and gardens in upstate New York. She owns and manages a garden design business, Perennial Wisdom, and is a Master Gardener with the Albany County Cornell Cooperative Extension, where she helps to manage their large demonstration gardens. Her work has appeared in such journals as Epoch, North Dakota Quarterly, and the New York Times Modern Love. Her newsletter appears as Out in the Garden and can be viewed on her website, www.perennialwisdom.net.
