Weekend Part II
Saturday was dedicated to putting in the garden. The patch of ground was broken a few times with the assist of a power tiller. I was grateful for the powered help. A neighbor who owns a horse farm was kind to allow me to obtain a sufficient quantity of barn manure for fertilizer. The contribution of the animals toward the future produce of the garden was turned under the surface of the ground a few days ago, before the last rains.
Yesterday I planted. Tomato plants in two straight rows of five plants each. Perhaps I have learned the lesson to avoid crowding the plants, giving each ample room for the vines to grow unencumbered by its neighbor. I covered the ground with straw between the rows, both to resist the inevitable competition from weeds, and to allow passage between the rows when the ground is wet and would be muddy without the straw. Then came a single row of cucumbers. The last row was of zucchini and yellow summer squash.
I felt a quiet satisfaction at the end of my day of planting, most of the time spent on my knees, by hand scooping out the dirt before each plant was placed. I remembered that my parents and my grand parents felt the dirt in the creases of their fingers and under their nails for many of the springtimes of their lives. I was glad to remember them in this way.
The success of the garden is in the future, unknown. The garden is planted out of need, with enjoyment, and as an act of faith. Nature, of which we are. and in which we live will have the final say in the outcome of my work. Day by day from now until the time of harvest the plants will depend upon the cause and effect of sunlight, weather conditions, enough moisture, weeds and bugs, etc. I will do what I can to protect and nurture them, but I am a bit player, almost negligible compared with Mother Nature.
Before commencing to write this story I thought of the human process of creating something new and that of Natures creation. I remembered the hulking Best-Buy building that has been empty for years adjacent to this Starbucks. It was cleared away, demolished by a number of powered construction machines over the past week. Destruction, rubble, ruin is a phase of human attempts to build something new. In human terms there is a period of destruction between something created in the past and something to be created in the future. In fact the language “creative destruction” is accepted as part of the dogma of Capitalism.
That is not the case with Nature. Nature is never destructive. Nature is always creating what is.
One thought on “Weekend Part II”
Dust
This structure, born
in ‘52, built of bricks
wood, nails and concrete,
walls, ceilings, floors all built
by my father’s hands, to make a home.
Yet on this evening,
I imagine its final day.
Leveled by crushing jaws,
some unknown machine
mashing once solid structure
into bits and pieces of what had been.
The image is not
a prediction of an
untimely end, as much
a notion of the inexorable;
a parade of future moments,
waiting to be swept into the past.
Ineveitability
is not the point,
no doubt exists,
but more is what I did
within that house while I was there
for the days of my youth happen but once.