A Bit of Earth (eBook)

SPRING

14

The Late Snow

You have fixed all the boundaries of the earth;

you have made summer and winter.

It’s the middle of March and we woke up—again—to a blanket of snow. Not just a dusting but a legitimate eight to ten inches. Wind is whipping up the snow devils in the fields and any sign of life has retreated back inside its burrow. Our normal visits from our barn cat, Finn, have stopped. He’s surely nestled inside of a barn loft with whatever old blankets or hay bales remain there. The birds have gone silent. A few stray deer trails wander across the neighbor’s back meadow, but that’s it. It feels like all of our spring hopes died overnight. I think of all those bulbs that had started to surface which are now buried far below the perfect white surface.

My phone dings.

“I’m struggling. Please tell me this snow does something for the garden.”

It’s one of my friends from church who is as desperate for spring as I am. Just a few weeks ago we were talking about our hens, how they weren’t laying yet, and we were eagerly counting down the days until our baskets were full again. They had just started laying. And now the snow. The snow that’s sure to stress them out and slow the egg production again, it seems.

So I pick up my phone and stare at the blank slate scene that feels almost perfectly painted outside of my kitchen window. The empty bird feeder swings in the winds. The garden gate is buried shut. The garden is a stark outline of broken sunflower stalks and brown love-in-a-puff vines drying on the trellis. The greenhouse is covered in white piles and the birdbath is frozen over, with a tiny white hat on the icy mini pond. It happens every year. My husband reminds me of this. He has a photo of every year saved on his phone. The spring snow happens every year and I’m always shocked. I always forget. I can never seem to remember the rhythm of winter ordained to turn into spring.

“The snow feeds nitrogen into the soil,” I text my friend as I stand at the window. “The poor man’s fertilizer.” And Lord, we are poor. Don’t I know it. We have enough in our home—enough to pay the bills—but my soul feels poor. My heart feels weary. My body is tired. I am as poor in spirit as they come these days, and the Lord knows I need his work.

The poor man’s fertilizer: nitrogen through snow. Nitrogen, which is necessary for all of the things we grow, is depleted quickly from the ground. Tomatoes, greens, corn, peppers, you name it. They feed on the nitrogen and grow into what we need in mid-summer. The soil needs it, the plants need it, and the snow delivers. In mid-March, when we’re hanging the Irish flag and looking for any sign of spring, the snow nurtures the ground. It feeds the soil nutrients for the long days of work ahead. For the season when nitrogen will be sucked from the ground by the hungry greens, the snow replenishes the storehouse. The snow tells us to wait. It tells me to slow down. It pushes pause. It tells me: “We’re in this together.” It covers the shallots and the garlic, the tulips and the crocus, the Star of Holland and the hellebores, and it says: “Not quite yet.” Like a mother who leans over her sleeping child at dawn, kisses their forehead and tucks in the blanket to buy just another thirty minutes, so the snow tucks in the earth at springtime. She leans into her velvet winds, her chilled fingers tenderly brushing our praying lips—just a few more minutes. Keep sleeping. The sun will rise and so will you, but not just yet.

Lord, help me to remember this when I am ready to jump into the next thing, the next season, the next place you call me to, that I cannot run ahead of you. When I feel you tuck me in instead of setting me loose, remind me that it is not for my suffering but for my gain. When I feel the weight of a winter snow on all of the things I’m dreaming and hoping for, remind me that you can restore in one short painful season more than I can muster up on my own in all my seasons of flourishing. You know what my soul needs. You know where I am depleted. Keep me from the self-sufficiency that wants to raise a fist at your gray and white swirling skies. Teach me to rest and trust you when I want to run and go. Teach me to soak in what you are teaching me when I want to just show off to the world everything I’ve learned. Teach me to be quiet when I want to shine. Teach me to be poor in spirit so I know your provision when it comes. Teach me to pay attention when you say—just a few more minutes. Keep sleeping. The sun will rise and so will you, but not just yet.

Cultivate

Do not be too eager to start the garden before it is time. While there are a few things that can handle a late season snow (peas, carrots, brassicas), others will wilt and never quite bounce back. Or they’ll turn black under the frost, showing the end of their new growth. Have patience. Have patience for the things that demand your faithful stewardship.

Instead, prepare your seeds for planting. Order the last-minute things you may have forgotten. This is a good time to even begin dreaming of how you’ll use what you plant. Do you want to try pickles this year? Order the best variety to plant now. You might even find a few local greenhouses will set out some early seedlings or flowers. Bring some of them into your home. Force3 some tulips and hyacinth from pots at your dining room table as you wait for the world to thaw.

15

Stuck: The Mud Season

The love of dirt is among the earliest of passions, as it is the latest. Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts.

There is an in-between season, between the cold and the blooms, right in the messy middle. The literal messy middle: mud season.

The muck boots are lined up on our back porch, crusted with dirt and chicken manure. The garden paths are thick with cement-like mud and with each walk to and from the greenhouse, I sink deeper into the ground. My sloggers often get stuck and I’ve lost my footing more than once, only to land with a socked, bootless foot into the slop, leaving the other boot behind.

One year I attempted to plant Bells of Ireland in this kind of weather. (I suppose that’s how most gardeners learn—we make a thousand mistakes until we figure out what works.) Planting Bells of Ireland in the spring mud does not work. Those poor seeds were swallowed alive in the following days, never to germinate or be seen again. Even the birds knew better than to dig. They waited, unlike me, for the ground to be ready.

At this time of year, when we make the trek up to Vermont to see my in-laws, their road is nearly an amusement park ride. The ruts in the mud are so deep, so unmoving, we remarked last spring that it’s basically driver-less steering. The road has determined which way you’ll go, like it or not. Mud is a powerful force, the earth coming alive with water—like clay in the Potter’s hands—going wherever he commands it. If you’ve ever experienced a flood, you know it’s not just the water that damages everything; it’s the inches of mud that seem to cake every surface. Mud stalls everything and forces us to wait, to see where the season takes us. To wash the floors again, check the weather again, and wait one more day for the seasonal signs that we have waited the right amount of time.

The mark of the beginning of spring does not mean it’s time to plant everything. As short as the planting season may be in some places, it is also very long. In the same way we quip “life is short!” and encourage one another to seize the day, the reality is that life is also very long. By God’s grace and generosity, we might get years and years of redundancy and patience, faithfulness and long-suffering. And so we learn in the spring that there is plenty of time. There is time to wait and pause. Ecclesiastes 3:2 encourages us that there is a time to plant and a time to harvest, and somewhere in between the two, is a time to wait.

Life is very long. I think this day after day, when my attempts at simple living seem more boring than faithful. When we rise in the morning with the same routine—coffee and books and Bible and songs—with breakfast crumbs trailing along the table’s edge. A pile of dishes before noon. Corrections, arguments, deep conversations about space, theology, culture, and literature. All these things, wonderful, but my oh my, sometimes they are shockingly long and slow. A road the Potter has formed for me which sometimes feels immoveable—ruts and paths that keep me in one place. The pace doesn’t appeal to the soul who longs for immediate results or productivity. It doesn’t feed the heart that finds great joy in change or forward motion. Slow seasons require us to do what is right and necessary, not necessarily what we want or demand. If we try and wrangle the sovereignty of God’s timing out of his hands, we might only find we’re in our socks, ankle deep in mud, wondering where all of our self-driven hard work ended up.

I know this from planting those Bells of Ireland seeds, never to see the work pay off. I sometimes wonder if one of the reasons the Lord tells us to be still and know that he is God, is because one of the prerequisites for knowing his big God-ness is simply being still. It’s stopping, for heaven’s sake. It’s letting the churn of mud slow us down enough so we can see who God actually is and where on earth he actually has us. The messy middle. The...