The Daily: 16 January 2024

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Winter is sloppy this year. None of that pristine white softening the earth. No rosy dawn over snow-mantled cedars. No crystalline days of cerulean skies and sunlight glinting from icy boughs. No silver moonrise over snowy hills. No lacework snowflakes falling on frozen rivers. No, nothing so solid as that. It’s been perpetually damp under lowering grey skies since July. Everything is gelatinous slop oozing down the hillside.

This is March weather in January. It snows. It blows. And then it opens up and pours sleety cold rain for hours, turning the garden into a sodden quagmire. My boots track mud into the kitchen and I grumble at the mess. I don’t remember what it feels like to be dry and clean. It would be one thing if spring were to follow on the heels of this muck — or at least the maple sap were running to sweeten the days. But it’s the middle of January. Maple syrup remains on the distant horizon, and there may be months of this weather before the first snowdrops unfurl their petals.

On the other hand, there are fiddleheads sending up their curled shoots under the juniper and arborvitae, and I can’t help but worry. It may be warmer than whatever passes for normal January and as wet as April, but there will still be many nights of arctic cold to freeze their tender cells. I wish I could somehow warn them, could speak the language of sap and green things, since the cedars don’t seem inclined to keep the time for the rest of the garden. What do they care, I suppose… it’s all one season to them.

Meanwhile, the seed catalogs are mounting. Special offers on all sorts of garden wonders fill up my mail boxes, physical and virtual. I can almost taste the tomatoes. But, while I have no problem dreaming up all sorts of garden designs while the garden slumbers under snow, in this quaggy weather I am incapable of seeing anything but mud and hours of fruitless labor. Why is that? It’s only a matter of a few degrees. Or perhaps it’s the lack of sunshine and vitamin D. In any case, I remain uninspired.

It is one thing to know that change is coming, maybe even here. It is another to be embodied in the unfolding consequences. I never realized how exhausting change is. There is no comforting routine and predictable pattern. And it’s so messy. Thirty years ago when I started to fear the future I never thought it would be so… muddy. And I read a lot of science fiction with all that murk and drizzle and actual exhaust. Still, I didn’t see this.

Is anyone else bone tired? And how does that feed into the changes? If we all just slump into the muddy days, will the system that is driving this weather finally implode? But then, will there be seed catalogs? And tomatoes?

I somehow don’t think so.

But there are seeds. Nestled in the soft soil with the fiddleheads and saved in paper packaging in the basement. It’s not like gardeners will ever admit defeat. This is one of the things that give me hope for humanity. Doomers and gloomers will prattle on about the collapse of society and the end of the world. And, no doubt, there are endings at hand, final days for many beings. And this is squarely our fault. But there are gardeners. There have always been and there will always be these solid but fey humans, in apprenticeship to the soil and the trees and the flowers, using their hands and plans to nurture and nourish life — once the weather is amenable anyway. In these future growing seasons, there may not be much left of this culture. There may not be seed catalogs. But there will be seeds.

I know all this, and I take hope from it. But under these dripping grey skies it is hard to keep that hope in focus. It’s all rather deliquescent and unstable. Muddy. I guess I don’t like mud. Mud refuses to stay put. That is probably the root of my discontent with this winter. Turns out, I’m not very good at squishy living. Nobody who knows my strong will would ever have guessed that, I’m sure…

So the lesson here is to just let it flow. You’ll be cleaning the kitchen floor more often. Your skin will be sticky in embarrassing ways. There will be niggling worries about rot. But the fiddleheads will be just fine. They’ve survived through eons of instability. Older than the cedars, even. Everything that matters has endured far worse than humanity. And will it really be horrible to not have seed catalogs?

Maybe not… though I will miss the snow…

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Addendum…

All the above was written a couple days ago. It is 9°F this morning with at least 6″ of snow in our forecast. So the salient thing is there are changes and they will make a mess…

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024