Taking Notice

Mondays, before leaving Quilcene Bay to return to Seattle, I take my cottage journal on our morning Kitty Walk.

Pausing at one of the benches on the way  I record the date and what happened worth noticing that weekend – the first sighting of violet green swallows investigating the birdhouses, or rototilling our garden and planting the first cool-crop seeds.

Most years, I don’t look back through the journal to see if nature progresses “on schedule.”  However, this year seems so out-of-sync, I flipped back a calendar year in search of normalcy.  This has been a cool April.  I did not plant arugula or potatoes by the end of March, as I did other years. Am I waiting for warmth?  If you read the instructions on seed packets, most insist soil temperatures must reach 55 degrees for germination.  In the Pacific Northwest, that would be summer expected in spring.  I substitute light for heat, counting on the lengthening of daylight to summon growth.

In any season we hear advice to slow down, pause, notice life unfolding.  But like a stern mother whose advice wasn’t heeded, Mother Nature and the Coronavirus have forced us to narrow the circumference of our activity, making time for noticing. In these weeks, the media has elevated poetry to the popularity of rock music.  Poets are known to take notice.  Forced to touch each other only through cyberspace, we email to our friends, poems, words of wisdom, images of sunrises and blossoms.

I am fortunate to have a wooded acre and a small vegetable garden to notice in my forced slowness.  Others within small, city apartments may have only a potted violet on a windowsill to watch nature unfold.  For the first time, their meditation may center on the endearing way their child butters a slice of bread.

This day, April 25, 2020, I photograph one of many ferns unfurling.  How otherworldly their serpentine fronds. For weeks I have passed tight-fisted knuckles in their hearts, for in late winter I had pruned last year’s large, browning fronds.  Regardless of my watching, they uncurl in their own time; but I also have last April’s memory of supple green ferns spreading across the hill.  Almost May 1^st, I am comforted, looking forward to where their funny, twisting dance is going.

 

 

Planting in the Year of a Pandemic

Last April, arugula greened

in fine lines, while spinach and lettuce

followed in their own leafy time.

Make a record of planting

so next year

if frost grips the soil

and black earth stares blankly back

in a year of illness,

you can look back

and say I had seeded by now.

Open the packets of promise.

If you have forgotten

the earth at fifty-five degrees,

imagine then the light

beckoning longer days,

the sun pushing gently against dusk.

In the garden soil

make a clean V in the shape

of geese migrating over the bay,

then mound the chilled dirt

like a dike in Amsterdam.

Drop each seed a safe distance

from the one beside it.

Cover them with one inch

of humus you enriched

with compost from summer grass.

Pat the seeded earth

with your own warm hands.