Casaubon's Book

Back...Mostly

Category: Book Stuff • writerly things

Hi Folks - It has been a week since I hit the wall and took off from the computer, and I'm back, at least sort of. The combination of a lingering illness, exhaustion from trying to finish the book, stress from a book not doing what I wanted to and just way too much time in front of the computer hit me all at once, and I really needed to step away for a while.

My wonderful editor at New Society (and the kind marketing director who I also dumped my stress on) have been really nice about my melt-down, and we're talking now about a new deadline and release date for the book. I'm very grateful to them. My best guess is that the book will be due next spring, and will be released in fall 2011. Despite the fact that I've had a lot of trouble with it, this is a book I'm really excited about - figuring out how to adapt your life to new circumstances, with what you've got, with the actual people in your life is, I think, a worthwhile project. It just hasn't been gelling for me, but being away from it for only a week has already helped me look at it more clearly, and I think it will be a lot better now.

Part of the problem has been that I set too fast a pace for myself. I got the contract to write _Depletion and Abundance_ in March of 2007, and because Aaron and I had already been working on _A Nation of Farmers_ contracted to write that one immediately afterwards. Before either even came out, I proposed putting my food storage material together for _Independence Days_. In a bit under two years I wrote three books, and had I made my deadline for _Making Home_, would have completed four in three years. I've been writing, editing or promoting a book (often both at once) nonstop for three years, and while I've never minded the hard work, I'm tired. Most of all, I think I'm tired of the computer, and longing to get back outside.

But of course, as someone pointed out to me, the person putting me on this schedule is well, me. A friend of mine, also a writer observed that normally, writers spend a year or two writing their books, but "you're just weird." I think I've been driven by a combination of how important I think getting the message out is, and my worry that Eric will be laid off (as a non-tenured faculty member at a New York State University) and my writing will have to support us. But it has finally occurred to me that driving myself clinically insane is probably not the best way to handle my concerns about the future ;-).

The funny thing is that I'm not usually a total overachiever - I'm much more of a slacker, and I think after three years of insane overachieving, my inner slacker is back. This is actually probably a good thing, if my goal is (and it is) doing good work but also having good life.

All of which is just a really long way of saying I'm back - to an extent. I'm still going to try and spend much less time at the computer. Right now, I think the book will be best served by my stepping away from it and focusing on other projects. A little distance is worth a lot. I'll be blogging, but not nearly as much - first of all, I'm extending my internet vacation into a few weeks of half-time, so will be posting only a couple of days a week until the second week of April. With Passover, spring and school vacation coming up, I'm going to take my time, sleep in, play with the kids and play in the dirt.

Once I come back, I'm planning on posting only three days a week, and I'm really going to try and stick to that schedule, so I can concentrate on new farm projects and getting my life back together. For at least spring and summer, that's my goal - we'll see how well I resist the siren song of the internet, but I'm trying.

The good news is that I'm already feeling really refreshed and excited about some new stuff. I've got a new challenge coming that I think is both cool and very inspiring, and the Artist Currently Known as Crunchy Chicken and I have a secret plan to take over the world. I'm turning ye olde blogge into a working farm blog, and I have some other ideas. So there's lots of good stuff coming as the season turns.

Thanks to everyone for your support, kindness and patience. The blog is officially reopened...mostly ;-).

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:26 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Burned Out and On Vacation

Category: writerly things

Hi Folks - I've been under the weather physically and stressed out mentally, overwhelmed by a book that isn't coming together and generally pretty unhappy recently, and I have decided it behooves me to take a vacation from the blog. So no posts for a least a week. I'm talking with my publisher about how to handle the book situation, but mostly, I need to get away from my computer for a while. Back when I've got my mental health back. And apologies to anyone I owe email or attention to - I will write back soon!

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 4:47 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Americans Increasingly Unworried About the Environment

Category: Climate Change • politics

A new Gallup poll suggests that Americans are less worried about most environmental issues than they have been since Gallup began polling 20 years ago.

"Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming."

People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming has to do with them - and that's a rhetorical failure. Speaking at NESEA, one of my fellow panelists mentioned Bill McKibben's highly successful efforts through Project 350 and Step-It-Up, and I had to argue with her - because, with all due respect to Bill McKibben who I like and admire, those movements have been extremely effective in reaching people already inclined to be reached, and totally ineffective at changing the way people think about global warming. At the same time that highly effective movements are arranging million person demonstrations in the streets, most of the people who will actually tell their congressfolk whether to vote for change were watching Law and Order SVU.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not attacking activists. But the correct measures of activism's success are all showing failure here - popular engagement is disappearing. You can point out that most of the denialist activists are idiots all you want, and show people all the good science you want, and get the same people who will demonstrate for many good causes to come out and march all you want, and not make any meaningful change.

So what's the alternative? Focus on accomplishing the right ends, rather than on getting people to share the same worldview. Ends can be shifted much more easily than worldviews - what people want is a much shiftier thing than basic values or who they trust or how they see the larger world.

Back in October, I went to Georgia to speak at a conference at an Mercer College on Climate Change - one of the first climate change conferences held at an Evangelical University. Most of the people who brought me were political conservatives or moderates, and I expressed surprise, several times, that they'd be so pleased to have a leftist Jewish envrionmentalist come talk to them. Every time I did, the conversation went like this "Oh, who even knows anymore what liberal and conservative mean anymore? I'm so sick of the discussion - neither side is dealing with what's essential!" The point was our common goals - not our common politics.

Everywhere I speak, I run into that general frustration with politics, with barriers that no one knows how to get past - and an overwhelming passion for solutions, for things like changing lives and building better communal infrastructure and transforming institutions. There simply are not enough people who care deeply about global warming in the US - and there may never be, other than brief spikes of interest when something happens. By the time it fully grasps everyone's attention, it will probably be too late to do much. But people are often fairly dying to get past the old political barriers and talk about what to do.

The question that arises is this - is the preservation of a planet, a climate and a place that we can actually live in, an ecology that supports billions of lives a first or second order problem? Is the preservation of millions of lives a first-order moral requirement? If it is a first-order problem, indeed *the* first order problem, then you can compromise on many second-order problems in order to deal with it and to achieve desired outcomes. If it isn't a first order problem, indeed, one of the central first order problems, then we may as well sit around waiting until everyone cares - because the outcome is the same either way.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 10:29 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Things to Read While I Write: Realities of Poverty Edition

Category: African-American • garden • poverty • women

Reaching the hellacious end-of-book period where I do nothing but merge endlessly with my computer. Thus, low on new content. So you can read this stuff instead.

First, check out "Little House in the Ghetto" which will be going on my blogroll just as soon as I figure out how to change my blogroll.

Waking up from this entrancement and becoming aware that options exist has given me opportunity and motivation in my own life. As hobo poet Vachel Lindsay remarked, "I am further from slavery than most men." This has been an unexpected gift from downshifting (dropping out) from mainstream consumer culture and exploring what can variously be called simple living, "green", diy, urban homesteading, welfare and poverty, community, or even paradise. As Greek philosopher Heraclitus noted, we must expect the unexpected, or we'll never find it.

The wealth we hold may not be obvious. Indeed, it takes an eye for beauty to see the wealth that abounds in my neighborhood. Our wealth lies not in consensus reality dollars, but in our collective security and abundance. We have each other, and we will always have each other. As governments fall short on cash and their enforcers (police, zoning, etc.) disappear, our freedom increases. We use this freedom to create realities that make sense in light of the world we inhabit. We invite homeless people to squat the houses that are falling down from neglect. We scatter seeds of plants that nourish ourselves and the community of life in vacant lots and alley ways. We rediscover handy skills in the dumpster of history. We raise animals and build structures that do not fit into zoning's view of safety, but that do fit into a paradigm of making sense. We raise our children with the knowledge that another life is possible, and provide them the tools they need to make a living in the economy of community. "

The New York Times has a good piece, I think, on the way for-profit educational programs are profitting from the recession - without necessarily returning anything of great value. I worry about all the people who think that going back to school is the solution to their problems - most of them are going to take on considerable debt in the assumption that by the time they are done, things will be better and there will be a job for them.

They tell people, 'If you don't have a college degree, you won't be able to get a job,' " said Amanda Wallace, who worked in the financial aid and admissions offices at the Knoxville, Tenn., branch of ITT Technical Institute, a chain of schools that charge roughly $40,000 for two-year associate degrees in computers and electronics. "They tell them, 'You'll be making beaucoup dollars afterward, and you'll get all your financial aid covered.' "

A spokeswoman for the school's owner, ITT Educational Services, Lauren Littlefield, said the company had no comment.

More debt, for most people, is not going to be the solution to their problems. Moreover, most community colleges will offer similar programs for vastly less money than the private for-profit institutions. In most cases, entry into these kinds of programs is a bad idea, and I hope all my readers will discourage folks from making that kind of desperate bid.

Meanwhile, as the stripped down, pathetic version of national health care we might even get totters towards failure, we learn that Maternal mortality rates have doubled in the US in 20 years, almost all of them preventable. Oh, and just for a real shocker, African American women die three times as often in childbirth as white women.

White women have a mortality rate of 9.5 per 100,000 pregnancies, the CDC said. For African-American women, that rate is 32.7 deaths per 100,000 pregnancies.

"Women's health is at risk," said Strauss. "We spend the most, and yet women are more likely to die than in 40 other countries. And that disconnect is what makes it such a problem."

Note that this is tucked way, way down on the CNN front page - way below the news about a few Prius owners and their problems, way, way, way below the Death of Peter Graves or the induction of Abba into some hall of fame. Decline and fall stuff always is.

As the States struggle with their budgets, the easiest places to cut are with those who have no power - the disabled, the poor, children. The usual first victims. Here's a good example, in Virginia (I'm not singling them out, they just happened to settle their budget the other day):

Funding for schools will drop $646 million over the next two years; the state will also cut more than $1 billion from health programs. Class sizes will rise. A prison will close, judges who die or retire won't be replaced and funding for local sheriff's offices will drop 6 percent.

Medical care providers will see Medicaid payments from the state trimmed, and fewer poor children will be enrolled in state health care, although those health cuts could be tempered by anticipated federal funds

States are between a rock and hard place, but refusing to raise taxes on the middle class and upper classes while stripping the most vulnerable of the basics is particularly charming - and fairly typical. I expect New York to do the same, if it can ever pass a budget. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, there's some proof that there's more fat to cut in state budgets - they don't have to wholly screw the poor.

On a more cheery note, I get a lot of questions about vertical farming, and I've often got to explain that the resource investment in hydroponics often is more than it is worth. But this is really cool - a low tech, low investment window garden model for people in apartments:

Willem Van Cotthem is a researcher specializing in combating desertification, an occupation he describes on his other blog, "Desertification". Here lies the origin of his low-cost, low-tech methods to grow plants and crops. Van Cotthem manages to grow vegetables and fruits in the middle of the desert with minimal water (pictures). Apart from the methods using plastic bottles described above, he also uses mini-greenhouses made of trash (yoghurt pots, plastic bags) to produce vegetable and (fruit) tree seedlings. All systems can be used both indoors and outdoors.

What all these methods have in common, is that they hardly use any water, basically by minimizing evaporation. Moreover, because of the low cost (using 100 percent trash), the systems can be used even by the poorest of people. Plastic rubbish is, unfortunately, everywhere. Van Cotthem's blogs can be a bit chaotic to navigate, but his work is definitely worth a look.

Also a nice BBC piece on the history of the Guerrilla Gardening movement. What I think is most fascinating about this is the degree to which most cities encourage and are pleased by people gardening this way - they can't afford to deal with urban blight themselves, but are grateful when it is done.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:53 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

When You Are Plowing the Ground with a Human Femur...

Category: humor • seeds

After all that work, you'll want to plant good seeds. Glenn Beck approved seeds, ideally. Well, Stephen Colbert is right on board, aware that in a disaster, we'll all want raddichio. He's even started his own crisis herb garden, because, "I may be ready for a world where the streets run with blood, and zombies rule the night and feast on human flesh. But I refuse to live in a world where I can't garnish."

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 5:01 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Poultry is a Feminist Issue?

Category: Economy • women • women's work

First of all, may I ask which New York Times editor was responsible for permitting the coinage "femivore" to pass into language. Talk about illiterate (linguistically a "femivore" would be someone who ate women) and uneuphonious - yes, yes, I get that you want to get a Michael Pollan reference in there somehow, but come on... any writer worth her salt could do better than that.

Now to the meat of the thing - the essay, which profiles Shannon Hayes's book _Radical Homemakers_ attempts to argue that focusing on food has given women a new set of choices.

Hayes pointed out that the original "problem that had no name" was as much spiritual as economic: a malaise that overtook middle-class housewives trapped in a life of schlepping and shopping. A generation and many lawsuits later, some women found meaning and power through paid employment. Others merely found a new source of alienation. What to do? The wages of housewifery had not changed -- an increased risk of depression, a niggling purposelessness, economic dependence on your husband -- only now, bearing them was considered a "choice": if you felt stuck, it was your own fault. What's more, though today's soccer moms may argue, quite rightly, that caretaking is undervalued in a society that measures success by a paycheck, their role is made possible by the size of their husband's. In that way, they've been more of a pendulum swing than true game changers.

Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place. Given how conscious (not to say obsessive) everyone has become about the source of their food -- who these days can't wax poetic about compost? -- it also confers instant legitimacy. Rather than embodying the limits of one movement, femivores expand those of another: feeding their families clean, flavorful food; reducing their carbon footprints; producing sustainably instead of consuming rampantly. What could be more vital, more gratifying, more morally defensible?

You'd think I'd love this, wouldn't you ;-)? And in some ways I do, but I'm troubled by it too. It may well be that Peggy Orenstein's (the Times article's author) "friends with coops" are taking the first steps in a radical disconnect from their culture of affluence, but it is more likely that they are getting chickens so that their lucky kids won't have to eat factory farmed eggs. This, in and of itself is not totally trivial - every contribution to reducing the number of CAFOs in this country is a good one - but without larger context, it isn't an answer to the problem that women have rotten choices. It isn't a third way if it is only viable for affluent women. Nor is it a third way unless it represents the accomplishment of something meaningful - if it establishes the possibility that others could have the same set of choices.

Orenstein uses the word "precious" here - and I think it may be in her community. Contrast that, however, with the women that Hayes is writing about in her book (full disclosure, Hayes once contacted me about interviewing me for the book, but from one thing and another it never happened) - most of them with household incomes under 40,000 dollars, most of them engaged collectively (with extended family or partners) in a project where everyone, male and female, does a lot of domestic labor. Hayes' work is about rejecting consumer culture and the assumptions about the "housewifization" of economic activity that make invisible domestic labor, that translate into valuelessness. She focuses on women in _Radical Homemakers_ but finds that the most successful households are the ones that have the highest degree of egalitarianism - that is, what's radical about it is that everyone involved is working to expand the household informal economy and limit the control exercised by the formal economy. All of this may be true of the women Orenstein knows - but there's no indication of it in the article.

I have often argued that the version of American feminism that largely succeeded - the one in which freedom was framed in the terms money and the right to work 60 hours a week for someone who times your bathroom breaks - succeeded because it was so very profitable for industrial capitalism. Besides the enormous pool of new workers, it offered new consumers, and created a large market for households to purchase services once done for free by women.

My argument has never been that women alone should have continued to provide these services for free, but rather that it is no accident that parts of the feminist vision that would have been less profitable, like state subsidized childcare, or a truly egalitarian distribution of domestic work did not succeed. It was far more profitable to send everyone to work and privatize the making of meals, the cutting of lawns, the tending of children - and to shift the labor onto the poorest and often least white folks around. Since only the most affluent of us can afford to pay nannies and house cleaners fairly, the equity that affluent women and men achieve often is built on the backs of poorer people who take on the labor that they escaped.

Housewifization of labor renders the household economy invisible, and things that are invisible can be infinitely exploited. Reclaiming the household economy, then, is a radical act. Making the case for the economic and social value of household labor, and making it the valued territory of both men and women does make a major shift in the culture. Refusing to exploit other people - only using the labor of others when you can pay them fairly is a radical act. Reducing your dependence on the industrial economy, your vulnerability, and having a measure of resilience in the face of economic instability is radical. But it only works if what you are doing isn't precious - if you aren't just making sure your lucky kids have clean food and contact with clean ground, but that others do as well. It only works if what you are doing is not the recreation of a simulacrum of a household economy - rather like Marie Antoinette's farm, where she milked cows on a silver stool - but an actual household economy, where domestic work produces a meaningful part of your household economy. And that requires fundamental shifts in how you view your home, your family, your economic and social culture. Otherwise, it is just precious - and empty.

The chicken coop can be a symbol - it takes a service that has been done exploitatively and destructively, and says "I can do this myself, non-destructively and without exploitation." But it works as a symbol only when you recognize the larger context of the act - the industrial chicken is a legacy of our desire not to know what price is laid on others and on nature to meet our desires, it is a legacy of our sense that the household economy doesn't have value, it is a legacy of our sense that ordinary and everyday things aren't important - it is an enormously powerful symbol if you are aware of what underlies it, and live your life in accordance with what it symbolizes. But if all it is is a coop, a way out of the conversation that begins "Oh, do you work?" well, it just doesn't work.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:41 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Want to See Something (ok Two Things) Really Cool?

Category: Book Stuff

First of all, I present to you, the cover for my new book (not yet finished, but it will be really soon) forthcoming this fall. I didn't think it was possible that they could come up with something prettier than the cover for Independence Days (which you can see on the sidebar), but I think they did.

I admit, I'm pretty impressed by it! Plus it fulfills the maxim that all my covers must have food on them, whether the books are about food or not.

Second of all, if you want to see someone's impression of me headlocking a fellow science blogger in a free-for-all, I'm in panel three of this very funny comic:

http://ataraxiatheatre.com/2010/03/12/what-erv-really-stands-for/

Clearly, I need to do more direct battle with my fellow science bloggers - and cultivate a better vocabulary in creative name calling.

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 9:16 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

When Cheap Food Isn't Cheap

Category: food

The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years:

More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance.

DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida's food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007.

Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also, I think, a compelling measure of the economic situation. But it is more than that - food stampls, as I've been arguing for many years, are important because as they become more universal (we're already at 1-in-9 Americans using food stamps, next year's numbers will probably be 1-in-8, and many states are at 1-in-6 - and American children are at 1-in-4) food stamps become more important. They shift from a safety net program to a basic food subsidy that serves a larger and larger percentage of Americans who can't afford food. And that should look very strange to all of us.

The case for industrial agriculture has rested heavily on cheap food over the years - the idea that it was worth all the subsidies, the land degradation, the health costs because we all had plenty was a fundamental premise of the move to industrial farming. But if industrial agriculture can't provide affordable food even with its massive subsidies (at this point a large portion of industrially produced food is being subsidized twice - first at the agricultural subsidy level and then at the food stamp level) what is the compelling case for large scale industrial conventional production?

Perhaps the focus should move. Michael Pollan has proposed, for example, that food stamps should pay double when used at farmer's markets. Right now only about 40% of all farmer's markets in the US are set up to take food stamps - making food stamp and WIC acceptance universal, and doubling pay outs when used to buy healthy food would do a lot both for local agriculture and for those who are struggling to eat and eat well.

The case for bringing agricultural subsidies to small family farmers is more complex, and among others, Gene Logsdon has argued that subsidizing organic agriculture (which is beginning to occur) may not be the answer:

This is supposed to be good news. Our dear government has finally recognized that organic farmers are at least as deserving of bribery as all those sinful chemical farmers. After all, industrial agriculture gets $17.2 billion dollars in direct payments every year so surely a little bit of money ought also to go to holy, humble, horse and hoe husbandmen who also help keep the world from starvation. In fact, organic farmers now have their very own farm subsidy program under the Environmental Quality Incentive Program to the tune of $50 million bucks. Ain't that wonderful?

Rule number two: "Conservation practices that farmers have already adopted are not eligible for payment." Amazing grace. If you have already been doing what every responsible farmer should be doing, you don't get any money, sucker.

Logsdon goes on to observe that with the inclusion of "transitional" farmers and the emphasis on giving money to those previously making the biggest negative environmental impact, the subsidies will go disproportionately to industrial organic producers.

But at a bare minimum we could ask ourselves about whether agricultural subsidy payments should exist at all? Most organic and small scale producers would be happy just to have the playing field levelled a bit. At a minimum, we need to ask ourselves this -if the food we get industrially is unaffordable in an environmental sense and unaffordable in a practical "how do we get dinner" sense, what's the case for conventional corporate ag again?

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:45 AM • 26 Comments • 0 TrackBacks

Peep!

Category: farm stuff • seasonal cycle

Note: It hasn't happened yet here, although we heard them down the hill in the valley yesterday. But we seem to be having an early spring, even though we've still got more than a foot of snow to melt off. I wrote this last year, and though the precise circumstances are different, the need for that sound is just the same. I know I owe y'all new content, but this one seemed appropo. Has spring sprung for you?

Spring doesn't come easily in upstate New York - she wrestles with Old Man Winter for a long, long time before he gives up. The first sign is the daffodils, up a small amount in February, giving false hope, but also inspiration - proof positive, as they fight through layers of snow and ice that spring may come in the guise of a fresh girl, but she is one tough young lady. But I have to remind myself - green stems do not mean spring.

Then comes the inevitable thaw, and the smell of wet earth, that scent that screams spring, but isn't quite because you'll have more frozen nights and wintry days yet. The grass, uncovered, greens up faintly, but the dominant colors are dull grey and brown, and we hold our breath for the change that can't come fast enough. The crocuses bloom, and that is a small change, a step forward, but the real thing hasn't come.

The birds come back, new ones each day - first the robins, of course, still in winter, but a tiny flit of hope for an end. Then the grackles come in waves (it is hard to be excited about grackles, but in winter, one can be happy about anything that prophecies its end). Then a bright dash of red winged blackbird, and then a sudden burst of new birds each day. But delightful though they are, the birds in themselves cannot carry spring.

Here, spring isn't a color, and it isn't a smell or a taste, and it doesn't even have wings (although it might have feathers, a la Emily Dickinson). Oh, spring has flavor - wild strawberries and overwintered spinach, dandelion greens and wild asparagus. Spring has smells - warm wet earth and daffodils, hyacinths and grass, and colors - the clear pure yellow of daffodils, the purple of crocuses, that sweet gold-green that blushes trees and the reddish tint of buds that preceeds it, the vibrant green of new grass. But it is none of those things.

It is a sound, a single sound, the end of wintery silence when the Peepers wake up and begin to call to one another for love. Peepers, for those of you who don't live where they do, are tiny frogs, who make a sound not entirely unlike the sounds of katydids or crickets when heard from a distance, but different, wonderfully strange and sweet up close. They are far too loud for their tiny size - standing next to a pond full of them, you would think you might go mad - except that after a long muffled winter of snow, you have to listen just a little longer.

One year, just once, I heard them begin to sing. We went to the wetlands on the edge of our property, walking along the road, and we stood in absolute silence and waited, and heard just one peeper take up the song for the first time - or maybe it just seemed that way. By that night, the whole watery area was in chorus, but just at the beginning, it was just one lonely peeper, calling out for love, hoping that somewhere there was someone else for him. It was strangely magical, and every year I try to duplicate it, to be there when they awaken, and spring truly begins.

This year we went, day after day, long before it was really likely that we'd hear them, when there was still ice along the edges of the water and patches of snow in the woods, but we went. And even Asher knew that when we got to the wetlands, we should stand, and be quiet and wait. And we would, hearing new bird songs each day, until something disturbed us. Yesterday, we got back late from the Greenmarket and errand running, and everyone was tired, so we did not walk out. And at chore time, as I was cooking dinner, Eric came back in and told me that the peepers were calling. We had already put the boys to bed, but ran upstairs, and opened the windows so that they could hear it too.

I missed the moment spring came to my place, but I expect that, no matter how hard I try and duplicate a near-miracle. Mostly, you don't see deep change happen, even though you know that it is occurring. You go out in the garden after an absence of a few days, and wonder how those tiny seedlings became those deep-rooted plants, or you look at your daughter and wonder how it is that she's lost the look of a toddler and become a child, with nobby knees and a galloping gait. Mostly the biggest transitions pass us by, and it is enough to say that you didn't miss anything important in its entirety. They say on hot nights in July you can hear the corn growing, and just once, I did hear the peepers awaken, but mostly the greatest transitions pass you by and that is our lot in life.

In a purely practical sense, were you looking at my mud-colored, snow patched landscape, you might wonder what changed, why I say that spring came. We still have more mud than green, things are still changing only incrementally, the daffodils still aren't yet open, although the purple crocuses brighten each morning. Things still squelch, and I know better than to plant out today - the peas I put in today will, as usual, sit waiting for dryer and more settled weather and end up being harvested at precisely the same time as the peas I plant out in two weeks - so why bother, except, of course, that I am chomping at the bit to plant anything outside. Seedlings are great, but they are not sufficient to sustain me.

All I can say is that I know this is it because it is - not very useful, I suppose, but I know that now no snowfall, no late frost, no burst of winter will make a difference in the consistent forward motion of energetic spring. So I wait to plant, the waiting is made easier by the singing of tiny frogs, frogs I almost never see, whose presence I would not suspect were it not for those short weeks in which their music dwarfs the birds and my noisy family, and shakes the foundations of winter. He's done for.

Spring has won, again. The rest will come slowly, achingly, and then it will burst upon us, and some people, looking at the flowers, the grass, the budding trees, will nod and say "spring is here." And we will smile at them and agree that it certainly is, and hold quietly the fact that we heard spring happen, and were there, if not for the golden moment, just after life returned anew.

Happy Spring,

Sharon

Posted by Sharon Astyk at 8:20 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks