MindSpinner

Why there have to be six wooden swords in the living room every afternoon when I come home, crafted from wood I meant for bean towers, I don’t know. They come out every morning after I leave for school as if reveille were sounded as soon as my back tires roll out of the driveway and onto the street. The couch sulks askew, its broad green back to the front door, its pillows disheveled, oblivious to everything except the TV that squats atop my grandmother’s cherry lowboy like a boxy household gargoyle.

How dirty dishes in the kitchen sprout faster than mushrooms after a week of rain, I do not know. How I have as much laundry to fold tonight as Rapunzel has straw to weave into gold, I’m not sure. I only took my eyes off the house long enough to wade into the paper pile. It’s not my fault I fell into its paperclipped stacks for a whole day, like an Alice swimming about in her pool of tears. It was deep.

But when this evening softened into long lavender light on soft greens, I scooped the white rabbit out of his cage in the house, nestled him into the crook of my arm, and took him outside to meet grass and clover and sky. We sat together until papers, kitchens and unfolded jeans faded like dreams you wake from, and there was only the new world, and wonder.

Graduation will fall on June 1. So little time until another school year is over. So much to do before it can be declared finished. For a senior sponsor, the to-do list looms in May like an avalanche about to come tumbling down. But beyond it, a measure of freedom. I’ve never needed a job to fill my days and afford me a sense of purpose.

The cold snap, which lasted nearly a week, proved a marked setback in the garden. There will be no peaches this year. My little Pawnee pecan tree, newly planted, shows no signs of leafing out a second time. Two roses are dead - the only hybrid teas - Memorial Day and Lasting Love. Standing over last year’s crimson rose, now a thorny gray fork, I promise the green-leaved clematis I planted to twine among its branches a more reliable support. The three-year-old variegated dogwood seems to have succumbed, along with the “hardy” rosemary I bought a couple of years ago. Other plants struggle to recover. The Weeping Japanese Katsura’s arcing branches have one or two living leaves here and there, as do the red twig dogwoods. Others are in a similar state. I’m going to give the “dead” things a few more weeks before I pull them out, just in case they are still mustering the wherewithal to try again, somewhere deep inside themselves.

I am struck by the lessons the garden offers about timing. Plants gradually hardened by coming winter endure much deeper cold than plants leafing out in spring, kissed back to life by lengthening days and warming sun. Spring’s new growth makes them vulnerable to sudden killing cold. Life, too, can work like this.

My neighbors covered a number of their plants with plastic on the eve before the frost - those would be the neighbors who put out rubber snakes to scare the birds away, as if we had a shortage of real snakes, or as if the rubber ones could terrorize the goldfinch and the robin when real ones obviously do not. I have so many plants, I would not have known to cover the pecan tree but not the new apple trees or the new currants and gooseberries. Instead I watched what lived and what died, and learned what the frost had to teach.

It is the wild things that handle nature best. The stonecrop is about to unfurl sprays of white along the garden path while the native phlox paints blue stars among the last of the daffodils. I think I’ll give the garden over seasons to the wilder things that have resilience scripted into their nature. Cold snaps have always nipped buds and threatened crops. There’s really nothing new about a killing frost in spring. What evolves is my sense of myself in the garden. I am less the artist, less the designer, than the bumbling apprentice, and my teachers are the frost and sun and soil, the yellow leaf and the green one, the rain and the dry spell, the forest’s edge, the birds, the insects, and the cottontails that cavort at dusk, promising to share my lettuces.

The rhododendron bloomed.

I’m postponing my spring wildflower walk until next weekend.

The weather’s not quite right. First there was the storm that brought the cold.

Today there is the snow.

I had something a little different in mind .