Let There Be Water Under the Bridge: April

This is what happens in April.

 Saturday evening.  I am watering wilted fuchsia baskets in the big house when Blake calls. He has checked the reservoir for possibly the 50th time this week and likely the tenth time this warm day with wind gusts up to forty mph from the south. "How're you doing?" he asks. This is a shorthand I understand.

 "Are we done? I'm watering sad fuchsias" 

 "Will they die? If you water them now, it will be all salt water.." 

We have a deep well, but it is so high in sodium, we have to mix it with our sweet well.

  I lift a couple of baskets to check...."No, they'll make it til tomorrow."

I shut off the hydrants and walk up the hill to the office.  Lee and Ryan, who have also been at the business end of a garden hose, are ahead of me.  We've done what can be accomplished with the resources we have.  The rest will just have to wait, just as we look to the skies, our phones, and the ten o'clock meteorologist to gauge our chances for relief. When there's no more you can do, you just go home.

At least it is Saturday night.  I've promised to grill some burgers for my husband.  This simple meal will include a head of cauliflower chopped and the seasoned burgers sprinkled with some tomato basil feta that appealed to me at the HyVee and hearty chunks of last summer's lime pickles. Blake will not complain.

Chopping the head of cauliflower reminds me of our trip to California's Salinas Valley last summer.  The Salinas Valley is a potpourri of food production, a crazy quilt of edibles in all stages from transplant to harvest, leafy greens to artichokes, all possible through the judicious and calibrated use of irrigation.  After two years of shortened field crops and the constant worry and expense of providing water to our greenhouse plants, I know what it is to deal with scarcity. We don't have a spigot to turn on when we need it.

But there is no agency turning that spigot off either. We scoop up some dip with our crunchy cauliflower only as long as there is water for those farms in California, only as long as those farms and that produce have sufficient value to society.  If, perchance, some California critter is declared scarce, the vast and productive farms return to the dust from whence they emerged.

The greenhouses are home to creatures above ground and below.  We fight the ages old battles with the rodents human history has pronounced a scourge; we stumble to avoid squishing harmless toads; we clean sparrow nests and wasp nests from our machinery and chimneys.  But there are marvels too.  The first butterflies of the season, the red admirals,  find a flowering oasis; hummingbirds in transit buzz through for a week or so.

  The locals make their best nests cheek by jowl with the working parts of the business. I enjoy the robins of spring, the swallows of summer that scoop snacks off the greenhouse plastic like it was a glassy ocean, the killdeer that ply their wiles in the fall as I pace the watering route in the mum patch. The line between habitat and human is large and blurred and is home to life abundant and sometimes unexpected.

There are two ways to solve the water shortage at Hurst Greenery.  One is to put the flowers on the trucks and send them to someone else to plant and care for; to change this:

into this:

And the other is Nature's way:

Welcome April Downpour

April should be for showers in our part of the world and if we spend some chilly days in raincoats with wet feet, we deal with it stoically, knowing all too well what pristine spring day after pristine spring day yields in the long term of July.  Rainy days in April go into the soil bank, literally, to be withdrawn by crops in the field and mums in the pots and flowers in the garden.  I'm donning my raincoat and three layers of shirts today on my way to work, hoping to squeeze another quarter inch out of the uncomfortable drizzle.

This is one part of April....

....and this is another...

Mud makes the grass grow....

"You choose a Life.."

Why was he a professor of literature? “Because I have an obsessive relationship with texts.” You choose a major, or a life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like an oasis, but because you like its objects.......Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker.

By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Genesis 2:2

Another Labor Day eve is upon us.  The day has blessed us with not just a longed for rain shower but also a drop in temperature of fifteen degrees. Farewell, fiery August and welcome to September, which begins with passionate heat and wanes gently through the equinox into the perfect  harvest days of October.  

We will labor on Labor Day, but this Sunday morning rain has enabled us to rest as well from the work which we had done and have been doing for weeks on end now.  Like farmers we have watched the barren sky whether the day is ice blue or blistered, but we have the will and the way to make water flow on our tiny patch.  So we do, and we watch the mums grow from stems to balls til the buds emerge and swell with color and the whole patch tilts over the edge 
of green to a rainbow of harvest hues.

"You choose a life, not because you see its purpose....but because you like its objects."

Unlike the Almighty, we are not given to see the reason why we are working or what we work for.  Rather, "ours is but to do and die"(Tennyson) .  We choose our work, our labor, for many reasons, or for no reason but necessity, but given a choice, we work for love.  We will accept tedium, dirt, danger, risk for one thing...and it isn't money. We will labor for what we care about.

Count me in. From morning glare to quiet dark, from drought to downpour and back again, from leisurely hours of observation and reflection to the headlong rush that waits for no thought, my work is a labor of love inside the dome of God's creation.  

Would I choose to push my glasses up my nose for the thousandth time or wipe them clear of fog, to lift these feet of clay and arms of stone for the twelfth hour, to worry about the wind, the clouds, the lack of clouds, water above, water below, and many of God's less attractive and destructive creatures, if I did not live to watch the many layered greens fade to the far horizon, hear the meadowlark, the robin, finches, chipping sparrows, wrens, and watch the killdeer lure me from her young?  The majesty of the seasonal procession and my tiny place in its mosaic does not terrify or awe, it comforts with its intimation of order and place.  

I find peace and pleasure in the miracles of plant anatomy, from seed to flower to fruit.  To pick strawberries or apples or blackberries or grapes is to catch a hint of Eden's glory and appreciate our tasks as stewards of this bounty. 'The earth is the Lord's and fullness thereof.' (Psalm 24) 

''Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.  And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” (Genesis 1:29)  A good number of those plants find their way into our hands, to sprout fragile roots, then reach their full flower and glory. What a great job to have!!  

 Or...we watch the planters follow the contours of our fields, the first duo of green to haze the surface, then an explosion of energy fed by sun's heat, the mineral earth, and mystery of the genetic direction within each plant.

We love this land, its mingling of rounded hill and flatland river made since the Ice Age. We accept and survive its uncertainties in return for its trump card: a soil my sharpshooter spade will slice silently, stonelessly. With each year's promise dim in the future, we still take pride in the labor expended and its ultimate fruitfulness.

By the sweat of your brow

    you will eat your food

until you return to the ground,

    since from it you were taken;

for dust you are

    and to dust you will return.” 

                                           Genesis 3:19-20

All is not goodness and light in the labors on the land.  Sometimes you not only eat your food, you eat the sweat and dust, too. Sometimes we are not master of the beasts of the earth and often we are mastered by the creatures that move along the ground. There is a place for them in creation, but surely I can be forgiven for wondering where it will be in the new earth?

At the end of each laboring day, we wash the dust of our work off and rest.  At the finish of this Labor Day, we give thanks for the blessing of work to do that ties us to the objects we love.