'Tis the Microseason

Blood-red catkins, tornado sirens, a ringing bell

Up top just want to say a quick but warm welcome to all the new subscribers! My last post was far and away the most-read and most-responded-to missive I’ve ever published on here. It was a little scary to put out there because of the vulnerability involved, so please know that the response is very, very appreciated. If you’re new to this little online space and want to take a gander at past essays: I’m a serial lawn killer, former farm worker, and garden designer who started writing publicly again as a way to try to thaw the decade-long creative freeze I’d been in. I also, notably, love to grow and preserve food, and even more, to eat. For paid subscribers: I’m working on a zine about my girlfriend who is a river that I’ll be sending you when I finish. Whenever you joined, paid or free, thank you so much for being here - it genuinely means so much to me.

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Maybe you, like me, live in a place that’s experiencing some early warm spring weather. Like…really warm, really early. Somehow I always forget that the beginning of the warm weather here comes with the bonus of getting that warmth blown at you like a giant’s hair dryer - hot wind blowing across the fields, making it not quite as enjoyable to get started on all the spring garden tasks as you might have hoped. But we go on anyway.

The warm weather, the buds on the trees, the birds chirping - more and more of them every day - all come with associated tasks. Time to prune the fruit trees, time to pour the winter’s ashes from the wood stove onto the asparagus bed, time to chop and rake the patches of native prairie plants so that everyone can germinate without being inhibited by the “thatch” layer that accumulates over time. This spring is a little different for me than springs past. This time last year I wrote about Frühjahrsmüdigkeit, or “spring exhaustion.” I definitely feel that same feeling of overwhelm, but it’s because on top of all the regular spring frenzy we are going to be moving away this summer, so we’re getting the house ready to sell.

I imagine I will have a lot to say about this in coming newsletters but for now I’ll just tell you how bittersweet it is to be leaving the trees and shrubs that I planted and mulched and pruned and watered through summer drought that I will never see in their full glory: the hazelnuts and the serviceberries and the plums (never to be in my icebox to be stolen!) and blueberries and willows and elderberry and on and on. I feel the devilish tickle of the voice whispering just let the reigns go. It’ll never be yours. But I know I have a responsibility to the beings that I’ve brought here, and it’s a responsibility I cherish - and which I know I will miss very much when we’re living in a rental with a big, green grass lawn come July.

So this year the task is finding the balance between being a good steward of the land and not driving myself insane with cultivating a garden that someone else will soon tend (Or destroy! Who knows!). I will not be building the three foot-tall raised beds I had planned, for example. Quick, early-season plants like radishes and tender greens are on the agenda. No tomatoes or ground cherries, no squash or cabbage. I blinked and almost overnight it seemed the garlic had sprouted. We planted it late in the fall and got tons and tons of rain, so I was worried that the cloves had all just rotted in the ground and I’d have no garlic this year at all - but no! Every single one has sprouted and is already about four inches tall. There will be garlic this year, thank heavens! I suspect that I will be pulling it out of the ground on the day we move, right before I put the yowling cat in the car to drive away forever.

The other part that comes with knowing I’m leaving is wanting to really notice and appreciate all of the big and small moments that are unfolding this last spring we’ll spend here. There’s such a specific heartbreak that comes with knowing I’m leaving a place (this will be my fifth big move to a different state/different part of the country in about fifteen years), the way that every little idiosyncratic detail becomes so vivid and so lovable, so absolutely irreplaceable. I do not do well in transition periods, in liminal times, and spring is already one of those. I want to fast-forward to solid ground, to the new place, new time of life, I want to run past all of the time that is left and just rip the band-aid off, grieve quickly all in one shot. But Pema Chodron reminds us in When Things Fall Apart (my paraphrase) that there is nothing but groundlessness in this world, this life, and rather than fight it we should learn how to surf.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do this time around, knowing that my dug-in resistance and deep discomfort with this in-between time holds something important for me. Maybe I’ll keep moving around the country until I learn what it is. But this effort at re-framing the time dovetails nicely into this idea of “microseasons” I’ve been marinating on for some time now. “Spring” is a pretty broad brush for what’s happening to the landscape right now, isn’t it? There are innumerable tiny transformations unfolding - migrating birds returning, trees budding, spring ephemerals popping up, yards greening - and we just call it “spring,” as if that could do justice to each one?? Feels inadequate, feels like a shrug, and I won’t stand for it.

Season of the onion grass and the garlic mustard waking up first to get a head start, delicious (aka season of getting hungry in the forest). Season of the poplar catkins that lengthen and turn a deep blood red before they drop by the hundreds onto the driveway. Season of the boldness of rabbits. Liminal season, frenetic flip side of the balance of the equinox. Season of shoots and sprouts and inventory of what has survived the winter. Season of starling hordes leaping up together from the ground and coalescing loudly into the branches of a tree. Season of walking into the wind, the garden awakening, hands on my hips, just before the tornado siren sounds. Season of the one day all the magnolias decide to ferociously burst into bloom all at once.

Last year right around this time I started keeping a little notebook for noticing these microseasons, and anything interesting or notable that I observed in our yard, in the garden, or hiking nearby. I got this idea from Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s book The Urban Bestiary. She and her family have been keeping a record like this for many, many years, and can flip back to see when certain migrating birds return or certain plants sprout, for example - the record becomes an archive. I love this idea and I have loved keeping my own scribbled notes. I love how site-specific this practice is, how it encourages a deepening knowledge of and relationship to a place. I feel a real sadness knowing that I won’t be seeing the same microseasons unfolding this time next year.

For example, this time last year I recorded that it was 25 degrees out when I saw some aquatic animal (An otter? A beaver? I didn’t get a good enough look to say for sure.) swimming in the man-made pond outside with YMCA. Then this past Monday, two days before this missive will reach you, I see the same swimming creature again! This time for much longer - I pull over off to the side of the indoor track to watch it foraging along the bank. Who are you? I wonder, and I start doing some quick internet research on my phone. I think it’s a muskrat: they’re small, mammalian swimmers who live abundantly in this area, and unlike otters or beavers they often live in many kinds of bodies of water, not just rivers. The vernal equinox muskrat, my new friend! I don’t know if I would remember seeing this little guy if I hadn’t written it down last year.

This month last year I also saw a female kestrel in the buffer zone here at home, herons in the drainage ditch, an eastern towhee outside the kitchen window. One of the things that’s lovely about looking back is that I can feel the delight that each sighting brought me, each entry a small joy. Today I wrote the entry, “Killdeer are here!!!” after I saw a cluster of the birds with their white neckbands and skinny sandpiper legs, which make them seem to me, along with their gull-like calls, like they got lost looking for the ocean. And one of my very favorite microseasons is upon us: that of the blood-red poplar catkins.

Populus nigra is a cottonwood not native to North America but there happens to be a gigantic one in my back yard whose acquaintance I have rather enjoyed making. It chucks down its small, nubbly twigs and buds in droves, the starlings love to yell at us from its branches, and right at this time every year it develops these gorgeous, vibrant red catkins and sprinkles them everywhere in its reach. Something about this last thing just takes my breath away with happiness to be alive in this world.

What even are catkins? They’re one of the sex organs of trees; an “inflorescence” if you’re nasty. These red catkins are male, and they are chock-full of pollen that is blown away in the wind in the hopes of pollinating female catkins on other poplar trees nearby to reproduce. Intimacy on the wind, shooting your shot, ever optimistic.

Season of lavender cauliflory on the branches of redbud trees. Season of the return of the bees buzzing close to the ground. Season of asparagus poking up from the ground like a joke. Season of oomancy: what can a cracked egg tell us about the year to come? Season of ecstatic rebirth springing again and again and again into life and all of it turning only on the axle of death. Season of the quickening unseen. Season of emergence. Season of the serpent’s return. Season of the ringing bell.

What are some of your favorite microseasons unfolding where you live?

Thanks for reading, see ya next time.