Bulbing

Today we started the “dark 60”, the days on either side of the winter solstice that are the most light challenged.  I feel for those that suffer in the cold and dark, but for me I know the next two months will go by too fast.  Besides the troubling experience of time accelerating as I get older (turns out there is a word for this:  zenosyne), there’s my sense that the winter days will outrun my long list of things to do before the daylight returns.  The fence needs a vole barrier (I will someday tell the story of last summer’s vole invasion, but now the trauma is too fresh to revisit).  There are new beds to dig.  Now’s my chance to gain ground against the blackberries and other invasive plants around the property (come springtime the best I can hope for is fighting them to a draw).  Hopes for starting a hedge, extending the pumpkin patch, and several other projects are already fading.  It’s ok, though.  Whatever I get done will be enough.  The farmer has a much more formidable to-do list and manages it without stress.  We seem to have found a sweet spot: we look forward to the pleasure of the tasks laid out for us in the months to come without feeling burdened about it.  As to the fleeting nature of the days, here is a useful perspective in a poem I encountered today:

IN PASSING

by Lisel Mueller

How swiftly the strained honey

of afternoon light

flows into darkness

and the closed bud shrugs off

its special mystery

in order to break into blossom:

as if what exists, exists

so that it can be lost

and become precious.

For those of you that can’t abide the “I wish winter wouldn’t pass so quickly” talk, here’s a hopeful sign: today the farmer and I planted this year’s new daffodil bulbs.  If, as a friend tells me, planting a tree is a prayer to the future, then planting a bulb is a prayer to the coming spring.  Clad in their papery tunics, the bulbs bear more than a passing resemblance to their relative the onion.  Similar on the inside too: a drawing student who has dissected one  reports  that the interiors are layered like onions; the layers provide sustenance for the plant’s initial spring growth spurt.  Like many flowering things, the daffodil buds are built the year before.  They sleep through the winter, swaddled at the center of their bulb’s tightly packed layers.

Besides the newly planted daffodils, we also await the ones that came with the property.  They grow wild all over the island, “naturalized”, in untended open spaces and roadsides.  The ones in our field are simple and small, with flowers monochromely daffodil yellow that look down modestly in a way I find fetching.  They come up in clusters, having divided from their ancestor bulbs.  We don’t know who started them here.  There were many bulbs in the sod I removed to create the garden beds.  I transplanted the ones that I spotted.  Others hid in the sod, and sprouted out of the wall I built for sod composting.  After they flowered (or didn’t – after all that jostling some were stressed to the point of only being able to push up a few leaves) I moved the bulbs to the various spots in the field.  It is pleasant to ponder them underfoot when I cross the field on a frosty morning, little packets of sleeping life poised to herald the spring.