Notes on Winter's Iron Door
It’s spring and “the sky / has shut its iron door // and bolted clouds / to the back of the moon.” John Yau didn’t write these words specifically about winter, but I think of them each year when the eternal run of saggy slate-coloured clouds, hanging low enough to almost touch, are replaced by skies either thinly blue or wildly starry. I suspect even those with Wallace Stevens’ “mind of winter” are secretly relieved upon spotting those first crocuses “almost holding their own” in the April wind like Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s treadmill of swallows.
But we are also aware that these days are a period of reconciliation with winter losses, both large and small. Behind our house, a beautiful spruce that used to have deep green-black needles the colour of Nantucket shutters could not hold its own against screaming onshore winds for days on end. Now this beauty leans at a 45-degree angle, half its roots in soil and half in air. I like to believe its arboreal family is sitting bedside, offering silent encouragement—and permission—to go. Now the greenery is beginning to yellow. The first signs of acceptance and, I like to think, relief.
And then there were deaths in our small circle this winter. Towering personalities who each lived rich lives filled with curiosity, creativity, warmth, and generosity are with us now only in memory. In other years, I imagine they were always the first to point out, with sharp-eyed jubilance, the first solitary crocus or the spade-shaped tip of a first tulip. There isn’t much to say, is there? Maybe a nod of the head suffices.
The greenhouses are packed with seedlings. Not an inch to spare. We stomp the mud off our boots while keeping the past in our pockets.
It has ever been thus.
Remembering John Davis and Nan Kleins
On this farm, of course, the onset of spring brings the chaos of seed inventory, orders, and starting. And mud, of course. With my patience as thin as the blue of these new spring skies, I’m learning to let the clumps of mud dry on the floor before sweeping the whole mess up. During these transitional days, the prospect of renewal adds a little pep, fueled by the warmth of the sun, to our step and eases the way for a readier smile.
