Yesterday, for the first time in years, I drove to Kentucky in a car with manual transmission. Instead of gliding through the turns in an above-it-all van, I was shifting and downshifting all through the two-lane part of the route.
Driving a manual car takes more brainpower than driving one with automatic transmission. My mind was on the immediate needs of the road ahead. This is good news for people who think too much.
The last two nights I have been watering the new plants as the last bit of light left the sky. It’s a pleasant way to see in the evening: the stilling dark, the birds with their last full trills of the day; the gentle sizzle of the water as it leaves the hose. I can feel my shoulders loosening, my jaw muscles, too. The cares of the day peel away. My heart is full; I’m ready to sleep.
If I’m lucky my day begins with daylight. But often it starts much earlier. For some reason I wake up at 4:14 or 3:35 or some other random, bleary number that’s seared into my sleep-deprived brain by that first glimpse of the digital clock.
It’s then that I wish for the soft landing of the analog timepiece. Yeah, it’s early, a little after 4, or half-past three. But just how early it’s difficult to say. Maybe I looked at the clock wrong. Maybe it’s almost 5. I like the fuzziness, the offhandedness of such a beginning. I’d rather not know exactly when I started my day.
My first home of memory was a two-bedroom house in a lot full of sunshine and two spindly trees. Our landscape was seared with light. The subdivision was called Idle Hour, named for a farm by that name. As the years have passed, Idle Hour (the neighborhood) has remained stolidly middle class, full of tidy little homes made of brick or fieldstone. The extra wide streets have kept the place perpetually young, looking wet behind the ears, just established, even though it has been around for years.
On my walk yesterday I passed the last stages of a new development in our neighborhood. Most of the houses are completed but the last few are still in process. One of those houses is just a frame and I spotted two workers balanced easily on its roof joists against the blue, blue sky.
The sight of a half-finished house reminds me of my childhood. The hammer and saw are the soundtrack of my youth. I will always associate that buzz and hum with life itself. With herds of children, like young deer running from yard to yard, pressing their noses against the screens of the cool houses next door (the house next door was always cooler, even though none of us had air conditioning) to recruit more members for a rag-tag game of spud. Everywhere we ran or skipped or pulled our wagon in those days we heard the sounds of new construction.
It’s good to hear them again.
Weeding, digging, mixing clay soil with peat moss and sand, preparing the ground for growth — for many years I have planted annuals on Mother’s Day. It is a chore that takes me, if only for an hour or two, into another world. The part I like the most, of course, is the end point of all the preparation — spading the newly friable soil and tucking the begonia or impatiens plants into it.
The timing of this task does not escape me. Every time I do it, yesterday for instance, I think of the metaphorical aspect of this Mother’s Day chore, of planting the tender-rooted flowers, of launching them into what I hope is a season of profusion. The teenage years have changed the way I think about this metaphor. I worry more about the hazards, the hard-packed clay, the weeds that choke, the rain that doesn’t fall, the deer who breakfast on my garden.
And yet, I still plant.
The horses this Derby aren’t up to speed, I’ve read. Foreigners (“furriners”?) have bought the best mares and sires and whisked them away. They are breeding now on other shores, their progeny are bypassing American tracks; they are racing in Europe and elsewhere.
I don’t compare times. When the horses pound the back stretch and round the final turn, they always seem fast to me. But I wonder if there is a collective failure of nerve, an unwillingness to take risks. I wonder if we’ve stopped looking for the bright eyed foal who can’t behave himself. If we are too enamored with ease.
We bought our house for its luscious old trees and we learned the hard way (tomatoes, peppers) that we’ve didn’t have enough sun to grow vegetables. But in the last few years, enough old oaks have tumbled and enough light peeked in that I decided to plant some lettuce seeds in the garden. Besides, lettuce is an early crop; it sprouts before the trees leaf. I would have a semi-shadeless backyard on my side.
Still, on the blustery March day when I planted the tiny seeds, I had little confidence that they would sprout. I’m skeptical of vegetables, surprised and pleased when the ground produces, well, produce.
But a few weeks ago the miracle happened — seed, soil, water and sun made food — and the last few nights I’ve stepped outside and picked a few bright green sprigs of leaf lettuce to add some crunch to our club sandwiches. It’s a simple pleasure. But sometimes a simple pleasure is enough.
Yesterday I wrote about searching for morels. Today the story continues. When we looked for morels we found other treasures, too: shag bark hickory, sassafras root, wild oregano, a luna moth just emerging from its cocoon, a hog-nose viper that could curl itself in a circle and play dead, three box turtles and a huge wild turkey.
Part of it was that we put ourselves in a large wild woods where these plants and creatures grow and play; another part was that we were training ourselves to see.
When I walk I’m often lost in thought. I’m not looking for food; I’m certainly not looking for hog-nose vipers or box turtles. I wonder what is coiled in the leaves and slithering through the ferns in our own suburban woods. Maybe nothing as exotic as what we found in Brown County Indiana, but surprises, still.
(No box turtles were harmed in the taking of this picture. This little guy was admired and then sent on his way.)
Whether by plan or by accident, our brief stay in Indiana came during morel season. And Tom’s brother Phil is one of the most hawk-eyed morel-hunters around. We went for a hike with Phil on Saturday and came back with more than a quart of the wild mushrooms. We cleaned the morels, soaked them and sauteed them in butter. Then we served them with steak and salad.
The morels tasted musty and rich. Eating them was like eating the woods. Every time I took a bite I thought about how precious they were, how they took so much effort to find, but how rewarding it was to discover them tucked up under a pile of leaves or hiding next to an old decaying log. Wild food. It tastes good.
(Photo by Phil Gardner)
We went to Indiana last weekend for a gathering of Tom’s family. And it was there, by the shores of a rain-water-swollen Lake Monroe, that we heard the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. We had just begun to realize that our cache of Scrabble letters was far more than the board (or our attention span) could use when we got a call telling us the news. Those of us with Blackberries and iPhones (this does not include me) found news sites were crashing from all the hits. So since the cottage has no television or wi-fi, we cranked up the radio in the old stereo receiver.
As we bent toward its sound, I felt we were drawn not only into a new, post-bin Laden era, but also into the past. We were like the people in “The King’s Speech” listening to George VI rallying his fellow citizens, minus the sonorous soaring of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU03byh6O1M
We strained to hear the scratchy sound coming out of the box, the narrow frequency fading in and out during the president’s brief announcement. We were startled from our lethargy, hungry for information, searching for a community in the airwaves.