…..the tough get going

They (and I do believe THEY are tiny, black nonentities whose business is purveying gloom and doom) told me that it’s going to start raining tonight and continue for the foreseeable future. They offer me temperature in the 5o’s today, if I want to get on the ball with the onions and peas. But you can see how THEY insinuate their power into my life  by taking several days out of my control thus gratuitously taking away another day, another goal. That’s the hole the lost opportunities fall down in. Because the other day happened to be lunch with Bunny at Al Fresco’s where the energetic Marlene dashes to our table already carrying the coffee she knows we want, ready to dash 0ff for our spinach salad with the bacon and feta cheese.

But resentment gets you nowhere. The view up the hill shows a kind of random fecundity.  A yellow miniature crocus has found  a place up there among the wet brown leaves. The leaves themselves, their color hints at bacteria breaking down their fibers. Below the forest on the ring terrace the blood root is already in bloom. It is an odd prehistoric kind of flower that pushes up, a graying brown stalk two or three inches high that suddenly pops open with a small white daisy like flower. This blood root holds so much promise because in this spot, which is in deep shade all summer long, it is the only sign of new life. Soon the azelea will begin to turn green, but by that time all the other plants are showing confidence in the coming season, and it is worth mentioning that below the ring in the first and second terraces narcissus, and daffodils of all shades of yellow and various mode of growth are budding out as the primroses also start putting out buds, and the best bleeding heart that heralds the coming hosta promises to surpass itself in size and pinnacle  of beauty before the hosta helps it fade from the heat of summer.

So much for flowers. It’s true flowers feed the soul, but it’s the vegetable garden THEY are allowing me to work in today. The lettuce I planted a couple of weeks ago is up, and I think I’ll plant a little more today, but the main business this afternoon is getting in the peas and onions. I guess that means I’ll have to put off raking it again until the expected rains stop.

Organization has always troubled me. Have I already mentioned that as a young woman I initiated time/motion studies into my housekeeping routine partly to avert boredom but also hoping to find in the activity an explosion of new time to read in. It seems strange in a way that in the middle of our worst depression corporations like Ford and General Motors were hoping to see each and every employee working at maximum efficiency (it would have been some number determined by the person who conducted the study) in order to avoid hiring more people. I did discover for myself what the big Unions, the AFofL and the CIO found, and that was that doing piece work at the rate demanded by the employer made people more tired and cut down on performance.

Even so I wish I had something like that to go by now. I don’t imagine it would be a surprise to anybody to know that as the winter doldrums begin to melt away like the snow, it is not only the plants that come awake. Suddenly there is so much to do. There’s the Community Chorale  production of Mozart’s requiem, under the direction of Tim Newton,; there’s  the small opera program at the Stamford Sunday concert series put on by the Met.; there’s a dinner at Caddis’s, the birthday at the Farmhouse, All’s Well  Well with Pat Gourlay for CCAL and that’s just a starter, beyond gardening. and deeper into the life of Oneonta. And just so everybody knows it The Oneonta Garden Club will hold its spring plant sale on May 14,  and will meet on June 1 in their Garden Club aprons to do the down town planting that makes it a pleasure to drive through Oneonta almost until January. It doesn’t really mater about he oranizing. Somehow it always happens:the onions get planted, the dinner is prepared  and you sleep well at night.