The Speck

I have just finished looking at some photos of our solar system and those beyond. I'll probably return to these pictures again and again. One of the photographs was of a sunset on Mars - blue near the horizon and red above - the opposite of what we experience on earth - and it jolted me awake to the reality that a sunset here on earth means that our part of the world is tipping away from the sun and that the colors we see are our atmosphere - the dome we live under. Would it make a difference, I wonder, to our strife, if every human on the planet was required every day to acknowledge the reality of our position on this marble we call Earth? I personally find something reassuring about the idea of worlds infinite beyond our world; beyond our comprehension. It takes the pressure off, somehow.

Here in Maine the sky, so broad and unfettered, presents our position quite clearly for one with the will to notice. I am not sure this awareness can occur with any regularity for city dwellers who spend so much of their time in the bubbles of their cars, buses and trains and the sanctuaries of their neighborhoods and homes. It's not their fault - it's just not so easy to notice the heavens infinite when dodging oncoming traffic or traveling upwards in an elevator. Even in the suburbs construction intervenes. As a former city-dweller I remember the elaborate contortions necessary to witness sunrises and sunsets through and around neighboring houses, trees, and lamp posts. The world is a comfortable cocoon for most of us...predictable and familiar. Until we look out.

I get the same physical feeling from looking at photographs of deep space that I get from taking (or anticipating) an amusement park ride or an airplane journey - a swoop of pleasurable fear and a thump of adrenalin-induced pulse. I don't like heights but can't resist looking down on fly-overs at the strange patterns we humans make across our world and at the beautiful and even more mysterious patterns the world makes over itself. But while looking down produces those not unpleasant reactions, looking out produces those and something else I can't define - a feeling of connectedness and also disconnectedness with the universe that I find dizzying.

This feeling is what draws me out into the cold in the middle of the night to look at the stars. I know about dying suns, satellites, dead planets whose light is just reaching us, space junk reflecting sunlight, dust particles, meteors and comets so I can look at a clear night sky in two ways: as a glorious sprinkle of light - twinkle, twinkle - or as a space that enlarges as I watch - out and out and out forever. This last observation usually first inspires incalculable awe; then, tips into a feeling of unreality that sends me scurrying back to a warm bed.

And I don't like to think about that ball of fury that is the sun. At all.

But I love the realization that, as I walk along our road or sit on the couch or putter in the garden, I am at right-angles to the universe, held down firmly by gravity as the clouds and the boundless blue that curves over my world roils and rolls overhead and the earth turns in a majestic pirouette, lonely and beautiful.

A few days ago I set off early and as I turned into the road the rising sun struck a flash of light off some object up at the top of the hill. My mind flipped through possibilities: tail light-soda can-roof flashing blown down by the wind? As I got closer the light grew smaller but no less brilliant, raying up from the road like a star and finally resolving into a single crystal of salt among the showers the town road crew had spread out earlier over a skim of black ice. There it sat, a tiny cinder amid the universe: bright, beautiful, unique, significant. And therein lies the wonder.

Moosehead

Up from Bangor, leaving the gem-like coast behind – the faceted boulders, garnet blueberry fields, opalescent sea and sky – for the yellow-leaved hardwoods of the north. Through towns bustling, towns on the skids, towns that never got started, towns completely finished. Past and over the foaming Kenduskeag; passed by the lumbering logging trucks and signs advertising goods, new, used and long-moldering, for sale. Everything along the way is for sale: pumpkins, horses, cars, houses, hay, cider, apples, tires, plow trucks, lamb, fish, books, acreage, “crafts”, railroad ties, trailers, motorcycles. It’s a hardscrabble life along here.

The lake and surrounding mountains are everything. I hope the distressed frequently “lift up [their]eyes unto the hills” because that’s about all there is – all and everything. And the undulations of the lake. And the cloud shadows passing over, fingering the mountains with darkness and light.

We arrive at our beautiful inn, shown up to a paradox of a room right out of a 1930’s Hollywood parlor romance. At any moment I expect Rosalind Russell to swan in – all dark lipstick and fingernails – hair perfectly coiffed and wearing a frock (never a “dress) of some glittering, silky, clinging material. Outside the lumber trucks rumble by.

This part of northern interior Maine was more prosperous in the days of the rusticators and Big Lumber. Evidence of this is all around – the fantastic, now faltering wooden confections that were the lakeside mountain houses, the rock-ribbed Masonic hall and this inn, a lordly mansion with its terraces and cannons. Here the Maine dichotomy is writ large.

Rusticators are mostly gone - hunters remain. They were always here of course, but now they tear up the woods in ATV’s instead of trotting in on horseback or tramping in on foot. There was an elegance and gracefulness to the past that has been largely lost. Weekend warriors have taken over the woods and lakes.

This is a rough part of the state. As with the coast, there is cold granite under the lush flowerbeds and, at this time of year, a biting wind off the lake that reminds me how bitter is the winter here. But it’s beautiful, beautiful. Run away, moose. The hunters are here, but they won’t stay forever and you can go back to your gentle, placid ways.

We feel as if we are in the back of beyond. We’re unfamiliar with this area and, although we live in a pretty remote part of the state, this feels even more separate because of its strangeness to us. I couldn’t live in this wilderness but I understand the powerful pull. Along the coast we have hills and distant glimpses of what we are pleased to call mountains; here are true mountains, magnificent and craggy, changing during the day from gray to blue to slate to purple. The movement of clouds over their sides and slopes is endlessly mesmerizing. On fine afternoons a band of light outlines the peaks with a frill of gold. In the woods the smallest detail stops me along the path: a scarlet leaf on the forest floor, a fist of springy moss, a tiny whorl of some small water plant caught in a cleft of submerged stone. These minutiae bespeak some tremendous otherness, so removed from our usual experience, so profound. I derive a deep sense of comfort from knowing it’s all here: the light bright across the tops of the trees, the ruffled brilliance of hardwoods against the pines, juncos rising up in flocks from the side of the road, the moose and her calf standing among the birches, the yellow leaves in the yellow light, the impossible blue of the lake, the lace of clouds. It’s all so reassuring somehow. It will all be here forever - at least that’s how it seems; a flow of life, separate from our human strum und drang, that all goes on in spite of us, thank goodness.

Going to Seed

This late summer I have spent a lot of time cloud-watching (riding the mower over the lawn is an excellent way to do this and still be useful, I have found). For the past few days we have been watching a lordly progression of fog banks and the build-up of clouds. From high up on the mainland hills the fog can be seen concentrated over the Reach. Huge peaks build sharply where the coasting moisture collides with the warm air over the water and shreds on the wind passing through the towers and cables of the bridge. Last evening, piles of thundercloud, backlit by a westering sun, billowed over thinning cotton-wool blown in from the water. The promised thunderstorm never materialized, but instead feathered off to the north and south of us, surrounding, but not touching our little island.

Today, slow-moving cumulus shrouds the mountains across the water. The tide is out and gulls skate the bumpy mudflats that widen out against the toothed crescent of the causeway. Cars hush across from island to island; engine noise muffled by the southeast-tending breeze.

Where the tree line of the mainland meets gentle undulations of cloud, a thin whisper of white light appears; it's clearing over the northeast islands and we are wound in a cloudy scarf that leaves an opening over our neighborhood for blue sky and late, buttery sun to pour in.

In the garden, bumblebees, still stupefied by last evening's damp and sudden dip in temperature, spread their wings in the sun or cling to the undersides of the leaves of bee balm, lily, phlox and rose. We're slowly leaving the too-green phase of summer when even a gray day intensifies the color of the grass, trees, garden and fields. The punctuation of Queen Anne's lace, black-eyed Susan, sunflowers is a relief amid all that green as much as the holly, cardinals, and mailbox flags are against the unbounded white of winter.

Already the early morning air feels like fall and crickets pulse in the grass. Already the gardens seem too full: overburdened. Tomatoes come in their usual rush, beans and beets, cucumbers and the last of the peas clamor to be picked and threaten to bolt. In the afternoons when the breeze comes up off the water it brings with it the damp sting of winter.

On a trip south lighthouse-hopping last weekend I overheard a woman, obviously from a warmer clime, ask a museum docent what the "little tomato-shaped things" were on the bushes outside. Of course they were rose hips, the bright inevitable harbingers of fall in New England. All around us seeds are swirling at this time of year. Vivid thistle heads have gone fuzzy and gray, the foamy white blossoms of hawthorn have fallen away to reveal carmine haws, holly-red beads pop out along the branches of the winterberries, and the fountains of red-orange drupes cluster on branches of mountain ash. The road to the water is crunchy with fallen cones, some still green, others showering the path with translucent seeds, and along the deer track goldenrod and milkweed send up clouds of fluff into the air.

In the vegetable garden, unpicked lettuce and radishes raise spires of blossoms aloft, pole beans fatten and and sunflowers lift speckled faces up to the hungry birds.

Soon every living thing will be busy. We will tighten up the house: add insulation, replace windows, weather-strip doors, lay in firewood. The birds will become frantic at the feeder and fight over scraps of bread in the yard. Bees will burrow in the throats of late-blooming delphinium and foxgloves, gather busily in the hearts of the last of the roses and crowd out the butterflies in the grape-like clusters of the buddelias. In the evening the deer already gather warily in the back field eating and eating the sweet, green grass. We'll all soon be in a hurry to harvest, preserve, protect, and gather in and the seeds will swirl out, out, out into the thinning air.

Swimming

It has to be a pretty hot day for a Mainer to think of swimming. Yesterday was one such, and we went to the beach. Our beach is a crescent of rough sand along the causeway facing south to the islands and beyond. To the left and in the center are barbarous canes lifting the most sweetly fragrant rugosas, to the right are piles of granite and sea-rounded rock.

Parents and children were putting tentative toes into the water, wading in the shallows and a few of the braver ones, swimming. I noticed how pale were these northern beach goers. Nowhere here the broiled coconut scent redolent of the seashore where I grew up.

Along that Jersey shore, summer is one long warm sunny day of nicely baked ease, softness, drinks from coolers, glittering jellyfish, snatches of music from the boardwalk, sleek seagulls and sleeker lifeguards. There is a rule-straight horizon where the beach meets water and water meets sky. Speedboats and jet skis plume along heedless of swimmers who venture too far out. Chubby toddlers pat the sand or nap in the shade of gently flapping beach umbrellas. Mothers read and doze, fathers run into the water and belly flop like ten-year-olds, teenagers and college kids preen and roast or sleep off the previous night in the shade of the ticket booth. A build up of bundled cloud over the water allows plenty of time to gather beach chairs, towels and sand toys and get home ahead of a thunderstorm. In the evening, the warmth of afternoon sun is still trapped beneath the wide blue sands and the scent of the hushing surf mingles with the taffy-cotton-candy-ice-cream-warm creosote smell of the boards.

Here in Maine beach-going is all tang and spice – no sugar sand, no Tiki bars, no cotton candy – just flinty stones and beach glass, blue-purple mussel shells, and cold wavelets lapping seaweed.

On wide, mid-Atlantic beaches there is ample room for retreat when the tide turns landward. Here the tide will not only catch you out but cut you off. Firm-appearing sands become quagmires, invitingly soft sand hides nail-studded timbers, remnants of lobster crates, driftwood splinters, dried crab claws and other sea-wrack.

Our beaches are small and hard, coves mostly, like crooks of elbows surrounded by a scrim of soil-on-rock where wildflowers bob. Often our only companions are deer flies, snakelike coils of kelp and the unearthly and amorphous inhabitants of tide pools.

You can’t laze the day away on these sandy outcrops. Even on the warmest days the breeze raises goosebumps on unprotected skin and sweatshirts and blanketed legs are the preferred beach cover ups. After midday we’re grateful for a rough blanket around our shoulders. Here, there’s an atmosphere of alertness; the air is charged with ozone, breezes shift and bite, and crisp white sails slice the space between the saw-tooth profiles of the islands. Instead of calliope music there is birdsong and the crying of gulls.

It's hard to describe the sensation of swimming in our deep blue. It isn't hard to imagine ice crystals forming on the raised arm of the swimmer who attempts even a brief crawl along the shore. Standing in the shallows, where little silvery fish and transparent lobster fry dart around toes, can produce an aching numbness that reaches high above submerged ankles. Maine swimmers go forth, breathless and wary, respectful and slightly overwhelmed by beauty, strangeness, cold, more likely to return home wind burnt than sun burnt and grateful for the fireplace. After a plunge from an island ledge I pop up gasping for breath, skin prickling, heart racing. Diving into ice-cold champagne might have the same effect.

When the sun breaks through the clouds it’s like a blessing.

Convalescent

Yesterday I spent an hour or so with a friend who has been sick most of the winter. Cold after cold have made her tired and fretful; her latest bout with bronchitis left her depressed and debilitated. But our conversation was pleasant and I left her believing that she was finally on the mend. On the way home over potholes and frost heaves, I realized that we are all more or less in a state of convalescence after a winter of endless snowstorms, ice, frost, cold and mud. Our cars are battered and dirty, our floors are tracked with gravely boot prints, our gloves are missing, our animals are stir crazy, and our tempers are thin.

The week we had of spring-like weather teased us out of doors into yards where melting snow revealed the detritus of the season past - discarded Christmas trees, layers of birdseed under the feeders, bits of plastic and paper frozen to the ground and twigs, branches, leaves, cones, and bark shorn from the trees in wintery blasts off the ocean.

Today I raked the flower beds revealing crocuses, scilla, little red fists of rhubarb, pale fingers of daffodils and iris. The warm day brought out swarms of insects and the earth softened in the sun. I took my lunch outside and sat in the sun trap in a corner of the house, turned up my face to the sky and pretended it was June.

The spring that I was three, my father was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a disease he probably picked up while serving in the Marines during World War II. He was sent to a sanatorium to recuperate. The hospital was not far from where we lived with my grandparents, but it was long enough for me to fall asleep on the way there and I would emerge from my uncle's car rubbing my eyes and cranky.

My father and his fellow sufferers, most of them also veterans, lived in a kind of barracks, unheated and bare bones, in the midst of what must have at one time been an arboretum, filled by then with overgrown cedar trees. We weren't allowed inside but my father could come out and visit with us in a patio area filled with benches and Adirondack chairs. It was the fashion then to dress little girls in cotton dresses year round. My little woolen Best & Company coat kept my arms and torso warm but my bare legs were always cold and I wanted to be indoors. To warm me up, and to provide my parents with some quiet time together, my uncle and grandmother would take me for a walk among the trees and it is the memory of those trees that comes back to me on thin spring days like this one.

There must have been quite a variety of cedars in that parklike place, but I loved the golden ones the best. I called them fairy trees and would make my uncle and grandmother join hands with me and dance around them just like the illustration on the cover of my picture book of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Fir Tree". When we all tired of the game, they would go off to sit with my mother and father and I would wander alone through that miniature forest, brushing the trees with my hands and telling myself stories, hunting for treasures - pinecones, feathers, pretty stones - under the fluffy branches, and feeling the spring sun on my head and shoulders.

After months of austere living, cold baths and colder nights on outdoor sleeping porches - the protocol then for the tubercular - my father came home cured. I don't know if I regretted the loss of my fairy forest or if I even realized I would never go back there except in memory. But in memory I can feel the warmth of that quiet enclosed space and see the sun on golden branches.

Along our road the pussy willows are silvery against the sky. The woodcock and killdeer are courting in the woods. At night the moon is a white disk, un-haloed and bright. There is a softness to the silhouettes of the trees and the alders are reddening. The roads will flatten out, the ice will leave the lakes and streams, the deer will leave the fastness of the woods and venture down to the ocean again and the lengthening days lift our mood, inspire garden dreams, give us hope, make us well.

Valentine

We're caught tight in snow and ice; it's so cold, -10 this morning. As an early riser I get to appreciate just how snowbound we are, before the first pass of the plow, before the first shadow of smoke from the chimney across the road, before the reluctant fading of the moon.

Even at this hour on a Sunday morning cars busily ply the causeway that connects us to our sister island. I always wonder where people are going to or coming from so early and in such cold. Activity seems at odds with reality, for we are all deep in hibernation mode. Dogs sleep and sleep, moving during the day with the splash of sun that makes its way across the floor, snuggling up to the woodstove at night. Cats spend the nights as unmoving bundles at the foot of our bed disappearing during the day to closets and crannies that hold the heat. Just watching the animals makes me want to sleep the winter away too.

When we do go out, the cold either beats up or beats out the color from our faces; lungs burn with the cold, eyes water. We have to gear up just to fetch the mail from the box down our long driveway, which has turned into a glossy river of ice. Out on the Reach, the rocks are cellophaned with ice, in the field the firs bend to the ground with ice, ice lines the eaves and barricades the back door.

But oh, the stars - trembling at night like crystal ear-bobs against the deep blue black. The moon is a crisp wafer, the shadows of the trees are long and sharp as penciled lines across the snow.

Now, at dawn, steaming vapor - pink and gold - floats up from the water to touch the shreds of higher clouds over the islands. An eerie reflection on the frozen bay mirrors the brightening sky a full hour before the sun pops above the distant hills.

Five am and it's a silent world without birds, without walkers along the road or dogs in yards. We're all holding our breath, waiting for the first "drip, drip" from the eaves.

On the table a spray of paperwhites is in full bloom.

White

The trees are bent to the ground in a lather of snow. All day yesterday the snow came down in thick, fat flakes coating the weather side of everything with the whitest white. Today in the thin sunshine the effect is all brilliance and dazzle. As we shovel walkways and scrape car windows it's hard to concentrate on the work at hand for looking at the reflected early morning sun - a bright yellow slash on the east facing snow-coated trees - or across the broad, flat, perfectly smooth sea of white that is the horse pasture. Our early afternoon ride across the causeway to the "big island" reveals glimpses of island trees speckled with dollops of snow, rocks iced with it, beaches covered in it; the sea, in contrast, hard and blue as sapphire; the sky a domed robin's egg.

At this time of year color stands out like a beacon: the red of the ribbon on a bedraggled Christmas wreath, the bright blue of a fishing buoy, the orange traffic cones marking the potholes, the flags snapping on their poles. It's too early in the winter to be starved for color, but that will come. I remember one snowy early spring when I had had enough of staring out the kitchen window at hillocks of snow and the dark, unending row of firs behind the house. Turning away from the bleak panorama of yard and wood I noticed a flash of yellow. Out by the stone wall two daffodils were blooming. I resisted the urge to plow out to pick them and stood and stared at that patch of yellow for a long time.

We get so used to the monochrome of winter that color sometimes feels like an assault on the senses. We have to gently lead ourselves into the psychedelic splendor of approaching spring with cuttings of pale forsythia in a vase, a pot of pink cyclamen on the windowsill or the greenish, creamy glow of an emerging narcissus. And with garden catalogs...which at this time of year fill the mailbox with hope and promise.

Long before the advent of June buyer's remorse (why did we buy six kinds of tomato seeds?) we begin to build the perfect garden in our minds. Mine is filled with sweet peas, nasturtiums, cleome, violets, and roses. Nothing I could nurture in summer could ever approach the Secret Garden garden I create every winter in my head. And it's labor-free. No scratches and scrapes from thorny canes, no dirt under my fingernails, no backache, no sweat. It's all there, perfect in it's un-perfection, a seraglio of color and scent. There might be one day during the summer when I achieve my dream. I might even have a minute to sit on a real bench and appreciate it...but then I will notice the weedy patch by the lilies, or the dandelion in the grass. No, this dream garden is what feeds my soul in the depth of winter.

Our dreams, after all, are what keep us moving toward some vision of perfection. That they sometimes come bound in glossy paper and stuffed into our mailboxes is just one of life's many ironies...and blessings.

Shhhhh

Late fall, and silence drops down over the landscape like a silver net, light and beautiful. Different from the crystalline hush that precedes and follows the snowfalls of winter this silence is moving - like waves on the deep ocean, like the fish beneath the surface - and alive.

Birds dip and soar, paddle and stride; leaves crisp down in the stillness of the afternoon; cabbage moths in pas de deux dot the air over the un-rippled water of the Reach; beneath the sand water seeps silently back as the tide ebbs. In the house sunlight melts like butter down the walls of quiet rooms; outside the windows clouds drift and cross.

This is a lullaby of quiet, a symphony of silence that only happens now in the uncluttered, generous pause between the jogger pace of summer and the magisterial progress of winter. It's a rambling time - a time to walk slowly on moss-muffled paths, to breathe grape-and-smoke-scented air, to feel the thinning sun in every pore and to lift the face to the sky.

By day the woods are awash in color: red and gold, ochre, purple, crimson, orange and magenta - nothing held back. The confettied quiet honors the beauty of a single leaf swinging slowly down on the breeze, the clutch of snowy mushrooms where the wire fence ends in a tangle and one bright aster along the road. At night the fingernail moon tips toward Jupiter, the horse roams his star-lit field, leaves drip and the sea hushes along the shore.

The silence is reverential like that of a church or a museum. It's a silence in which sudden sounds don't startle so much as intrude - a silence that, for a time, allows the hum of activity and strife to settle like leaves onto moss: comfortable, companionable, demanding nothing, dispensing grace.

Bountiful

I am having trouble keeping up with the vegetable garden this year. After almost 20 years of gardening in Maine, I have become used to the appearance of one red, ripe tomato long about August, but this year I will have bushels. I have been picking beans since the middle of July - unheard of - and have been deluged by cucumbers, chard, potatoes, eggplant and peppers. I am ignoring the zucchini baseball bats that lurk up against the deer fence and skip out of the way as I pass the burgeoning foliage that waves above the bed of turnips. Sweet potato vines are blooming, sunflowers fountain like fireworks behind the pole beans and the pungency of marigolds drifts up to me from the weeded paths. Everything is scrambling to germinate, leaf out and fruit.

It's happening everywhere. Hard to believe that the woods in April barely showed a haze of leaves above the dun of last year's fallen. Suddenly perspectives disappeared in emerald, kelly, forest, sea, fern, and olive greens. Now, berries - black, red, green and purple - tumble over themselves in the thickets along the road; rose hips glow like little lamps from the depths of thorny hedge roses. Wild lilies and orchis lift plump seed pods aloft in the shady places and the perennials in my garden frill out, the heads of the flowers heavy with seed.

There is more of everything this summer. Even along the shore the shiny seaweed and rockweed spread out higher and thicker than I can ever remember and sea lavender and wild sweet peas bloom in lush bunches - fat brush strokes of color against the gray shingle of the beach. The New England asters bloom, drift-like, in the fields. Purple asters are in bud and ready to burst out brilliantly against the goldenrod. Black-eyed susans and butterfly bush are swarmed with fluttering Monarchs and Fritillaries, heavy with bees and little birds.

It's almost embarrassing - this amazing bounty. These are days of grace, I know, before the nosedive into winter, and I am savoring every one, even as the shadows lengthen on the grass and the sun sets earlier and the evenings cool. At night in the clear, windless dark, it even seems to me that there are more stars, so bright and dense the stream of icy light that flows over our house in the great sweep of the Milky Way.

On the most beautiful days, in the flower garden or stumbling back from the vegetable patch burdened with more food than two of us can possibly consume, I think of the people a world away and closer who are homeless, hungry, hopeless, lost, angry, and in despair. I have given up trying to understand the why of it all and do my best to share, appreciate and be grateful. Is that enough in this crazy world? I have told myself it is - I suspect it is not.

It's tempting to think we deserved this summer - after last summmer's cold and damp and previous summers' brevity we're entitled to this glorious sweep of sun and warmth. But doesn't everyone deserve to be warm, safe, fed, loved? I hope, since it seems to be our turn at the moment to be lucky, that our salvation lies in recognizing the inequities, attempting to correct them and in accepting our blessings with humility and grace.

Yoked

No, folks. That was not really a life-threatening domestic disturbance you heard yesterday afternoon - just me and my husband screaming at each other over the planting of the vegetable garden - a yearly ritual that has taken place ever since I can remember us having a vegetable garden.

We have different visions, he and I. I think that, on some level, every year I am trying to reproduce the vegetable garden my Pop-Pop laid out every spring, webbing white string across the soil with surveyor-like precision; carefully planting the seeds along each string; gently covering the seeds with soil that was as soft and fluffy as cocoa powder. There were tomato plants staked in hopeful, marching band rows and corn that was always "knee high by the 4th of July". I can't help it - it's the garden I grew up with that pops into my head every February when I begin to think about buying plants and seeds - a garden as much artistic expression as it is practical and food-based. Ironic, because Pop-Pop's garden was there to feed a family of eight and provide a little income when the excess was sold. I always have to remind myself that he also had five kids, 13 acres and a tractor.

I don't know exactly what the dream garden in my husband's head looks like, but I imagine it's somewhat different. For all I know the vegetable garden of his childhood was a row of lettuce and a couple of tomato plants in pots languishing in the back of his parents' suburban quarter acre. I do know that, for him, it's all about experimentation. Cantaloupes? Sweet potatoes? Artichokes? Asparagus? It's more about getting a strange and intriguing assortment of stuff into the ground than about aesthetics.

We both love gardening, so this would seem to be a not mutually exclusive pairing, in spite of technique, so where does the conflict come into it?

Well, we get tired right off. I mean it's not as if we were farmers, exactly, though we both come from "farming stock". And there is the black-fly element which has driven even the most avid gardeners to shoving each other out of the way as they run for cover. And the witch grass. The witch grass certainly doesn't help. Mostly, I guess, it's just a matter of our competing visions - his for tastiness and variety (practical) and mine for display (ever my problem in this and many other things). Hence, the arguments every year.

Now that the yelling is done for this season, we'll go along through the summer, not unlike two old, yoked farm horses: one pulling ahead, the other lagging and keeping an eye out for a mouthful of clover in the furrow. Zigzagging our way across the field together we'll both arrive, more or less at the same time, at the same place.

Heat

The first day of spring arrives in a haze of bright strong sunlight and fire. The earth seems newly awake and on the move. On our drive back from a weekend trip to New Hampshire sunlight dazzles through bare branches, strikes off granite promentories and tinsels the ice cascades along mountain passes. Blueberry fields, brush piles and meadows are burning and the combined smoke casts a Vesuvian scrim over the baby blue sky.

I am always startled by the intensity of heat in the spring. With no leaves to provide shade the sun strikes down as pale and dangerous as a blade into the dry leaves in the wood, needing only a burning glass to set the forest floor on fire. Everything seems brittle and stark; crows exult from the tops of the trees and deep in the mold, red fists of skunk cabbage thrust upward toward the warmth.

In the confusion of the sky cirrus and cumulus sail past each other and through them the pale light flattens out the perspective and shadows disappear. In yards as we drive past people lean on their rakes and turn their faces up to the sun.

Ritual burning has a distinctly pagan feel. As one old Mainer friend put it, "we burned up all that mess on the knoll". How tempting to believe that this burning harks back to the strange and scary cleansing rituals of our wilder ancestors. How nice if we could clean up the mess of our socio-political pathology so easily - a little virtual conflagration to help us start off clean.

Soon the rain will come to soften the sharp edge of this pleat that separates winter from spring. The grass will green up, crocus and daffodils will bloom and our world will rock gently to the kinder rhythms of breezes not wind; rain not snow; mud not ice; blue not gray. Through the blackened stubble lupine will emerge in elegant spires, blueberry barrens will turn copper-green, in the vernal pools frogs will commence their rock 'n roll din. And once more we'll have come through the ice and the fire into a new and gentler world.

Distance

I am nine and sitting in Mrs. Hussey's hot, dusty classroom. The floor is scuffed from the shuffling of 30 pair of brown oxfords and their correspondingly rubber-booted "going home" feet to a soft buff. I look at the floor a lot, trying to avoid eye-contact with Mrs. Hussey, and find this impression of softness comforting. The desks are wood, one piece, with a writing surface grooved bumpy with dozens of names and initials of previous occupants and connected to the seat by an iron arm. Beneath the seat is a wooden drawer, always too small for what it is expected to contain: textbooks, black-and-white speckle-covered exercise books and papers that are to be taken home but rarely are.

The radiators hiss and vibrate; the incandescent ceiling lights glow down on bent heads. In the cloakroom damp garments steam and outdoors the sky is the color of slate behind black branches lathered with new snow. In the corner of the room a faded American flag stirs gently in the heat.

Mrs. Hussey's back is to the classroom. Her wool sweater is ornamented with a string of yellowish pearls above which her red-brown hair curls in a militant ruff around her head. Her plaid skirt reaches to her calves; the heel of her left pump is worn slightly inward. I notice all these things because I can't get my mind wrapped around what she is saying. The chalk squeaks.

Oh, no! She has whipped around to face the class - is she looking at me?

"If a train leaves the station at one o'clock and another train leaves a station 60 miles away in the opposite direction, at what time will they pass each other if each train travels at the rate of..."

No, no! What is she talking about? When will I ever need to know the answer to this question?

I am sitting on the train waiting for it to leave the station in Albany when this scene flashes through my mind. I know how long it will take the train to get to Chicago...it's a long time: 16 hours. If there is a train traveling at the same rate of speed from Chicago, I know that we will pass each other at some point but I couldn't care less where. Right now my mind is focused with pleasant anticipation on the journey ahead.

I love trains, even though some of my experiences on them have been less than wonderful. There was the time we took the train to Florida when Lizzy was a baby. Awful. We broke down four times, and each time we were all told to de-train and stand along the side of the tracks, presumably for fear that another train would come upon us (at God knows what rate of speed from the same direction) and pancake us all into oblivion. There was the 20-hour trek from Chicago to Albany where we sat for 45 minutes looking at the station from 50 feet away, but we couldn't pull in because there wasn't a track available. To my mind, however, these were minor discomforts, compared to airline snafus - glitches in an otherwise pleasant history of riding the rails.

In Europe the trains were sparkling clean and fast. There was wine and fruit and cheese and the seats were large and inviting. On the Erie Lackewanna in New Jersey I took my very first train ride from Millington to Lyons Station (15 minutes of rushing woods, fields, horses, farms, a river and a trestle) where my Uncle Allen picked me and my grandmother up and drove us home. I rode the Erie Lackewanna many times after that when I was working in Manhattan - an hour and a half in and back. The seats were wicker and my stockings suffered, but I loved the old fashioned cars, the ironwork overhead luggage racks, the testy conductors, the sturdy-looking emergency pull cords, the scent of coal and oil and the way the engineer waved at departing passengers.

And in spite of time it takes to get there, I love the trip from Albany to Chicago and back again. A fellow passenger once remarked that the train is called the Lake Shore Limited because it travels along the lake shore of Erie and Michigan and the speed of it's forward motion is extremely limited. And sometimes this is true. So on the train I enter a state of suspended animation. I can't go anywhere except to the dining car. I can't concentrate much on the reading material I bring because of the fear of motion sickness. I am left with the options of napping or gazing out the window, watching the backyards of America blur by. I find a strange comfort in this moving forward without moving. Friends who fly cannot fathom my love affair with the train. But these days it takes a whole day flying or waiting in airports to get anywhere anyway.

Once, trying to articulate my reasons for taking the train, as I fumbled for an explanation my daughter said, "I think you just enjoy the journey." Bingo. Part of the enjoyment of travel for me is getting there, appreciating just how far it is to where I am going, the time changes, the people I meet, the sense of temporary community among the passengers.

Because of the length of the trip from Albany to Chicago we have to sleep on the train. I always go to sleep immediately in the oddly comfortable fold-down bed with the thin but warm blanket and the surprisingly plump pillow. But I often wake several times during the night, usually at a station stop. It's an odd experience at 1 or two in the morning to look out on a railroad platform (where are we?) and see travelers boarding or de-training in the dark. The early hour and the sense of not quite knowing where we are lend an aura of mystery to their behavior which would seem utterly ordinary in daylight. As the train pulls slowly out of the station I watch as the lights of whatever city recede. Along the way, no matter what the hour, there is always some car or truck waiting at a crossing, some light on in some lonely farmhouse, some watchman walking around a warehouse yard - some human activity to defy the night.

In the morning in the dining car we're seated with strangers and over eggs and bacon, cereal and juice, we soon begin to exchange information that finds common ground. Often, we become so engrossed in the urgency of learning as much as possible and sharing as much as possible of each other's lives that we have to be asked by the attendant to leave so someone else can sit in our place. This does not, I have observed, happen in airports, but it always happens to us on the train.

As we near our destination there is a purposeful bustle in all the cars, incoherent announcements over crackly intercoms, and a sense of departure that is at once more and less exciting than when we left our original destination. Here we part ways and go on to home or work or loved ones, to problems or joys unimagined or deferred. My heart always gives a little bounce at the end of the outward trip as I anticipate seeing my family and at the end of the homeward trek when I think about seeing Dick, if he is not traveling with me, waiting in the terminal for me to arrive.

There is a scary element, of course. At night the engineer may try to make up time lost during the day and I will awake to wild rocking and bumping and wonder briefly about infrastructure. And there are the moments when a passing freight or passenger train seems so close that I could touch it as it rushes by at some unimaginable speed - traveling in the opposite direction. Then these little alarms pass and I settle back and enjoy the ride.

Turning

By the end of August it’s obvious here that fall is coming. You can see it in the way the long grass leans over the roots of the trees where the mower can’t go; you can see it in the lengthening of the light across the lawn and hear it in the sleepy throb of the crickets. At night the far-off moon - a bright disc against a spray of stone-hard stars - shines down on pumpkin vines and the pale orbs of squash in the garden.

At the end of August my garden goes gray. The magenta, red, orange, yellow and vermilion of the summer border quiets and softens. Under the drooping faded heads of phlox and shastas soft mounds of lamb’s ear gentle the path. Lavender, artichoke, artemesia and gypsophilia break in gray and white waves over the feet of coneflowers, butterfly bush and rudbekia.

In the field heads of New England asters foam around the dried tassels of goldenrod and crest along the road in billows of white. When we wake in the morning it is more often than not to fog and the gauzy weaving of hundreds of little white spiders, each of their webs a handkerchief filled with droplets as tiny as the head of a pin.

Then our world is gray and white - and so quiet that birds questing among the grasses at the end of the road hear me turn a page in my book and spill gently up from the brushy border to arrange themselves in a neat line on the telephone wire above.

Late August is the time of year when the lights go down on summer; soon enough the curtain rises on fall.

Suddenly a spill of bright red leaves appears along the dirt road by the water and before we know it swamp maples are burning up the edge of the meadow and lavender clouds, thick and heavy with unshed rain, build and billow behind them. In the late afternoon when the sun is low, a bar of light reaches the tops of the trees - a stripe of gold as bright as a searchlight.

Now, blue wood asters cluster along the road, their bright purple eyelashes fringing yellow centers. Winterberries and wild rosehips light up the boggy places where last spring I noticed the first skunk cabbage emerging; Tarzan vines of bittersweet enliven the peaty blackness of the firs. Most days, the sky is as blue as the inside of a mussel shell and the water below it a deep navy. In the garden a final blush of nasturtiums, sweetpeas, coral bells and late anemones glow against yellowed spears of iris and lily. When I take my walk in the evening poplar leaves, as papery as flaked gold, whisper ahead of me along the road and swirl behind me into the woods.

The birds, busy at the feeder, are bright and light as drifting leaves: red cardinals and their golden-buff orange-beaked mates; blue jays and bold black and white woodpeckers, goldfinches already in their winter olive drab, cedar waxwings, classy in khaki and black.

On a fair early October day it is impossible to stay indoors. I sit on the bench in the garden where the sun pours down, syrupy and warm, all afternoon. It is so quiet and so warm in the sun - a better-than-summer sun. And the garden is somehow a better-than-summer garden - no longer a kaleidoscopic tangle with every shard tumbling over every other. Now each flower, yellowing leaf, seedpod and stalk is eloquent and individuated.

What we experience now is an ever-changing ribbon of color that will fade from the hectic scarlet of maples to the elegant burgandy and dusty gold of oaks; a gradual gentling of the landscape that prepares us for the monochrome of winter. In another month or so our seaside world will pare down to undulations of snow, gray green firs and black branches against the sky as one year tips into the next.

An Absence of Fog

We have been in the fog and rain so long, it's old news...beyond old news. It's boring news. Depressing news. Not even news any more.

But this weekend an amazing thing happened. The fog lifted and there was a whole world waiting behind the curtain. A world we had forgotten existed: a world without snails and slugs, frizzy hair, damp towels and a house that smelled a bit too much of Dog.

We emerged from our homes blinking, mole-like, at the unfamiliar light...and immediately began to take credit for the change in the weather. "We deserve this sunny day" is a phrase I have heard a lot over the last 48 or so hours...as if we had any say about what we deserve.

But such hubris can be forgiven. We are giddy with sunlight on grass, starlight on water, flowers blooming on top of flowers in gardens. There is a brightness, not seen in years, to the goldenrod along the road. Queen Anne's lace towers over alders. Dame's Rocket shoots up in sparks of bright magenta; woodland pools have cleared - insects have gone back to the misery of mud from which they sprang.

The boggy odor that clung to the low places along the road has been replaced with a crispness and tang reminiscent of early autumn and the mold has disappeared, as if by magic, from the bathroom ceiling.

For the first time in weeks we can actually see the top of the towers of the bridge that leads to our island and glimpse the frill of twigs at the peak of the north tower where the osprey have built their nest - see the osprey too, for that matter.

In fact the birds, which had been huddling in the copses and hedgerows and woods fluffed up against the damp, are now out in a profusion of feathery abandon: goldfinches, robins, jays, thrushes, killdeer, finches, nuthatches, cedar waxwings are all but running into each other across their mysterious skyways while eagles and gulls wheel above and the sun beats down.

Soon enough we'll wake to another gauzy day, but for now we'll take this summer gift and be grateful.

Mower

Is there anyone who doesn't hate their lawnmower? Or is that just me? Over the course of a long marriage I have come to believe that the spouse who cuts the grass should choose the mower...but that has not been the case with us.

What I fondly call "Lawn Mower Wars" began early on when I realized my husband doesn't like to cut grass. Nor does he like to rake leaves, but that's another story for another season. I, on the other hand, used to like cutting grass. In fact one of my fondest childhood memories is of my patient Uncle Al teaching me to use his powerful self-propelled (as in take a dive into the woods) lawnmower and allowing me at age 8 to maneuver it over my grandmother's acre or so of a "backyard". Come to think of it there may have been an ulterior motive there too...

Anyway, lawnmower selection was done by my husband from year one - or rather three, when we bought our first house. Our first mower was a serviceable machine quite capable of cutting our big, country lawn that dipped in odd places and from which thorny patches grew. It is interesting to me that in all of the lawn-cutting pictures of that time, and there are many as it was our first house, I am the one behind the "wheel" so to speak. About that time Dick also bought an old-fashioned pushmower. As far as I could see it bent the grass over rather than cutting it, but he liked it so I didn't say anything, grateful for the enthusiastic, if infrequent, help.

I am not a fan of lawns in general. I have taken over more and more of ours for gardens, which pose their own set of problems of course. I have plans to dig up even more lawn this summer in an effort to conquer a back-breaking hill in front of our house. But a patch of green is nice in front of the flower border and I love the smooth, undulating expanse of our back field which is mostly grass and lupine. It gives me pleasure to see the neat line of mown lawn - a demarcation between the tamed backyard and the wildness of the meadow after the grass is cut. And of course the scent of newly mown grass is one that takes us all back to lazy days lying on our backs and watching the cloud circus roll by.

So lawns in their place are fine, and now we are back to the issue of the lawnmower.

When we first moved to Maine we bought a new one. We were assured by the man at the local hardware store that it would tackle "puckerbrush" and would be an excellent "bush-hog". This proved to be incorrect, although it did an average job on the lawn. The blades, dulled by frequent collisions with man-sized boulders lurking under the surface, had to be replaced regularly and the self-propel mechanism died the first year. It served us fairly well, but after several seasons of rough use it became apparent that we needed a new one. Let the Wars begin.

First, Dick resurrected the old manual from the barn. (I had thought we sold it at the yardsale we held in New Jersey before moving, but somehow it made it to Maine.) This lasted exactly a day when there was a major confrontation in the front yard regarding whose responsibility it was to cut the grass and who should be allowed, in consequence, the choice of weapons. Fortunately, the pushmower capitulated all by itself by jettisoning it's handle into the blades on the next pass around the lawn. We (I) struggled along that summer with the old gas-powered machine, but late that August Dick came home with a bargain "for you"...a mower he found at a yardsale for "only $75". Now my opinion of yardsale lawnmowers is not high, but when the machine started right up and roared off with him behind it across our lawn I began to feel better. The big wheels in the rear of the cutting area enabled us to hip-hop the machine over hummocky spots and the blades ground up roots and thorny shrubs with gusto.

I figure that when Dick bought that mower it was already about two or three years old. That was 12 years ago and "old reliable" as he calls it has outlived two newer more expensive models although now it is really showing its age.

About 8 years ago the handle for the choke fell off and we now have to jimmy the wire out when starting the machine, and in when we want it to stop. The pull cord for the starter broke years ago and was first knotted together and its handle replaced with a sturdy stick (not ideal) but has now, thank goodness, been replaced. The baffle on the back that prevents rocks and gouts of grass from shooting out from under the blades has been gnawed off in several places; the chute on the side that directs clippings into the non-existent collection bag (did we ever have one?) is hanging on by one fastener and there is an odd piece of unidentifiable but very strong and rigid metal projecting out of the opening. The sound the machine makes as it goes up hills is a terrifying rattle that always makes me think that at any moment some loose engine part that has been bouncing around inside the guts will suddenly propel itself through the housing and hit me in the eye. The padding around the handle has long ago disappeared and been replaced with foam fastened down with that machine maintenance essential, duct tape. It's rusty, moldy, and noisy. The front wheels are cantilevered at an angle that surely can't be intentional.

I hate the thing.

But it starts. And with the new blades Dick put on last fall, it cuts the grass. So what if I have to haul it around like a sack of concrete?

So what if I feel like I have been inside a jet engine and have trouble lifting my arms over my head after mowing the grass for an hour? So what if my sneakers and the cuffs of my jeans are covered so thickly, post-mow, with grass clippings that I have to use a paint scraper to clean myself up?

It starts. And it cuts the grass. And life goes on.

Alone

We're moving uneasily into a gentler season. I am happy to leave the winter behind. It's best not to think too much about winter until it's over. In winter I sometimes get the feeling that we are all hanging onto life by our fingernails, deluding ourselves that our little cardboard houses can protect us from the elements, that we won't end up sliding into a ditch, that the power will stay on. Obligations have required a lot of driving this year...weather worries have made the anticipation of long drives stressful, but once we get going I begin to enjoy and appreciate our transit of Maine, particularly the stretch of I-95 between Bangor and Augusta.

Along that route we pass through forests thick with second-growth fir, cedar and spruce. The early sun pinks up the bark of birch trees in groves; we pass by meanderings of black creeks winding into a softness of still-snowy woods. We pass over rivers and ponds; hedgerows of leafless trees make lacy patterns on the snow and across the new grass; beaver dams rise out of the marshes where sumac wands redden with a hint of spring. The sky on fine days is a wash of blue-gray and on cloudy days a creamy white expanding into infinity over the curving road. I love that drive. I, in fact, love most drives.

I have often thought that driving alone across the country would be a wonderful time of self-discovery and affirmation - I don't think I would be lonely doing it. Of course, being lonely and being alone are very different. Loneliness implies permanence, despair and a certain underlying sense of panic. But being alone is a temporary state that anticipates the eventual and inevitable embrace of others and as such, my moments alone are times I look forward to with pleasure.

The sense of the impermanence of being alone gives me the space to think comfortably, get things straight in my head (if only briefly) and then I can happily look forward to not being alone.

Driving alone I think long thoughts, appreciate the distance between things, feel the bones of the countryside and immerse myself in the waterfall of impressions glimpsed at 50 - 60 mph: the minutiae of backyards, little towns, clouds, distant city skylines, horses in fields, hawks sweeping over the road, and my own internal landscape.

And then, best of all, I can turn around and drive back home to the people I love.

Eggs

Our neighbors now keep chickens. As I walked by this morning their rooster was in full voice and it struck me as so odd that instead of reinforcing the realities of our rural life here, the sound of the cock's crow instead took me back to the farm in New Jersey where I grew up. Memory is a strange thing. I have been thinking a lot about memory lately, having recently reconnected with people and places from the past and having just come home from a reunion of our tiny nuclear family: me, my mother, daughter, her husband and mine.

My mother's memory is getting more and more selective. She shared with us last weekend that as a toddler I was allowed to keep a brood of bantam chickens. I have no memory of this, although I do remember other babyhood occurrences. Nor do I remember the charming picture she conjured up of my Pop-Pop coming in from the coop and offering me a double handful of tiny, perfect eggs. I can picture this, of course, but I don't remember it and, if it happened, I wish I could. My mother may, of course, have me confused in this pretty picture with a younger sibling of hers and that may explain the otherwise perplexing undertone of jealousy in her voice as she told the story.

Connecting on Facebook and in other ways with former fellow "victims" of the educational system and of other past lives, makes me realize just how subjective memory is - something about hearing the rooster I guess, but I suddenly imagined memories as eggs; not the kind produced by Martha Stewart's perfect Auricana chickens, but the kind I used to find among the chocolate confections and jelly beans in my Easter basket.

This egg was always placed in the center of the green, green Easter grass - a kind of ovoid jewel - inedible sugar sparkling with glitter and smelling, oddly, of dust. Inside were scenes, sometimes enchanting - who could possibly be living in that tiny shimmering paper house among the paper daffodils; disturbing: giant paper bunnies towering over paper cherry trees; mysterious: an ornate, white paper cross glowing amid a flock of adoring paper lambs. More than anything else on Easter morning, I looked forward to that egg. It provided a glimpse of the ordinary made extraordinary and, in a way, perfect.

I think memory is like that: we lift the egg to our eye and make of the contents what we will.

Garden

Last night we had a small dinner party to celebrate Dick's birthday. We're all hungry for spring, so I brought out the tablecloth with the embroidered roses and my aunt's Adams china with the stylized flowers and birds. This morning as I put the china away, I turned it over to see if the name of the pattern was stamped on the back and it was: "Country Meadow". I long ago realized, that although she was a career woman whose job and inclination took her all around the world and who lived in cities all her life, my Aunt Jean was a country girl at heart and collected things that reminded her of the country and her homeplace which actually was on a farm in New Jersey.

I have a lot of her things and they all reflect the tug of the country life: paintings of farmhouses and country cottages, books (especially the Stillmeadow series by Gladys Taber), transferware cups and saucers depicting country scenes and, of course, her china. Even when she traveled, the places she enjoyed the most were the ones that evoked memories of the gently rolling hills of Somerset county New Jersey where the rest of my family lived.

My grandparents moved to the farm on Valley Road in Millington after my aunt was grown up and in the Army nursing corps during World War II, so she never really lived there, but she visited nearly every weekend after the war. As a little girl I looked forward to her visits. She always had time to cook something special, carve a pumpkin, teach me to use watercolors, hunt for violets and wild strawberries or read to me. I now recognize that those weekends "home" were a way for her to enfold herself back into the family and so the farm became the focus of that connection and no matter where she lived or traveled, she thought of it as home.

I come from a long line of farmers. My grandfather, bless his soul, was a traveling salesman, but wore himself out on the farm after he got home from work each day. Driven by a need to feed a family of five, he grew vegetables, kept a cow and sold milk, tomatoes and corn from a roadside stand. His father was a dairyman, his uncles were farmers in Hunterdon and Union counties. My grandmother's people were farmers too - her relations had a big apple farm in upstate New York - so it's no wonder that I grew up with dirt under my fingernails and the scent of newly turned earth in my nose.

I have lived in cities all my life as well but always felt the tug of country life and that's undoubtedly how we ended up here in rural Maine. In a way, my whole family has led me back here.

In my daydream I am five or maybe six years old. It is late spring and I am sitting on the little step in front of the tool shed, or the “little house” as we called it. In my lap is a pot of earth and sprouting from the earth is the crinkled leaf that will be a marigold. I planted the seeds in Sunday school weeks ago and it has finally sprouted. When they bloom, the marigolds will be a bright, metallic yellow like the foil-wrapped chocolate coins I found in my Christmas stocking. The sun is very warm on my face and legs - and on my feet, bare for the first time this year. Behind me the little house is filled with tools, machinery, nails, and paint. It is cool and dark in there from having been shut up all winter and an intoxicating smell of machine oil wafts out the door and mingles with the lush scent of the lilacs blooming in the shade against the old house.

Straight ahead of me I can see my grandfather’s head bobbing along beyond the honeysuckle hedge as he maneuvers the old tractor up and down the field making rows for planting. I can’t see her, but I know that behind the tractor my Aunt Joyce is walking along, grumpily feeding seed corn into the furrows he is making. On this side of the hedge bordering the yard, the ample form of my grandmother bends over the flower border. She is weeding or transplanting or simply peering at the earth to see what is coming up there. Next to her stands her tiny sister, my Great Aunt Mame, holding an enamel bucket of scraps from breakfast to take out to the to compost heap.

Next to the house, in the shade of the lilacs, my mother is on her knees, her gloved hands patting bright red geraniums into the earth. Behind the geraniums is a thick growth of snowberry bush. My father is toiling along the strip of grass next to her cutting a crisp, pale path through dark, new grass with the old push mower. Behind me in the little house, my Uncle Al is tinkering with the gas-powered mower with which he will cut the big back yard.

My Aunt Jean walks up to me from the old barn and in her hands are the first red, ripe wild strawberries from the tangle out back. In the little basket swinging from her arm is a bunch of violets and lily of the valley that she has picked from the sunny corner near an old foundation where they are growing wild.

From my spot on the steps I can see the ancient catalpa tree in the front yard is just beginning to bloom - some of its orchid-like blossoms already scattering across the grass. And on a sudden breeze the scent of the sun-warmed strawberry bush out by the mailbox rushes over me. I breathe, and breathe, and breathe it all in.

We are all so different, my aunts and uncle, parents, grandparents and I. My grandfather is a hardware salesman, my Aunt Joyce is still in high school. My mother is a laboratory technician at the VA hospital nearby; my father, newly discharged from the Marines, works in the office there. My Uncle Al is a car mechanic, my Aunt Jean, home for the weekend, is a nurse. My Aunt Mame is a dental assistant and my grandmother is…well, my grandmother: cook, laundress, head gardener, seamstress, decision maker, and leader of the pack.

But at this virtual moment, which is really the distillation of so many moments from my childhood, we are all gardeners.

Folding

I rarely fold a towel and don't think of my summer job many years ago as a chamber maid at the Hilton Inn in Tarrytown, New York. I learned a lot things during that brief stint: not to eat the frozen parfaits they gave us at lunch, how to hide from problem guests and who were the nicest ones, which rooms were the easiest to clean, how to fold a hospital corner and that bellhops would always and forever get the best (sometimes the only) tips. But the most lasting takeaway from that job was an unforgettable lesson on how to fold a towel. There was a very strict aesthetic at the Inn, and each wing had a matron who checked each room after we finished. Many times I went tearfully back to fix some minuscule infraction. In the beginning I was called back regularly to correct the droop of the towels on the bar in the bathrooms. Finally, the most militant of the matrons took me in hand and spent a half hour coaching me in towel-folding. I still mentally repeat her instructions every time I fold towels in my own bathroom: fold the towel in half, bring right and left sides into the center, fold the towel in half again and voila! It is a satisfying nicety that I actually enjoy performing.

Neat folding, I have to admit, has always been somewhat of an obsession for me, going back as far as my infanthood. Family legend (and my own dim memory) has reproduced the story often enough, of how my aunt, at the time a hospital infant ward nurse, tried to teach me how to fold a receiving blanket around my baby doll. She placed the blanket on the floor for me, point north in a diamond formation; placed the doll in the center of the diamond, brought the bottom point up over the doll's feet, folded the east and west points across the doll's body and the top point over the doll's head: a perfect papoose. But not perfect for me. Time and again, apparently, I yanked the blanket off in a fury, doll flying to the other end of the room, because the point of the blanket didn't end up in the exact center of the doll's forehead. Fortunately I got over this fetish by the time I had a real baby of my own.

I am always straightening things. This doesn't mean that my house is tidy - far from it - but certain things IN it are tidy. The forks in the silverware drawer, the handles of my pitcher collection all at the same angle, the arrangement of the photos on my desk, the soft stack of scarves in the coat closet and, of course, the pile of towels in the bathroom.

We often leave off the niceties in this rushing world. I was reminded of this again recently when a dear childhood friend reminisced about my own grandmother having sent this friend a corsage for some long-forgotten occasion when she was a little girl. I found it so poignant that my friend remembered the gift clearly, but not the occasion. Gram was a stickler for such gestures but it was because she enjoyed performing them. I remember lunch parties under the apple tree in her back yard, the card table set out with an embroidered cloth, her good china, and little plates of thin sandwiches with the crusts cut off, pressed glass goblets and a frosty pitcher of lemonade. Perfect.

My mother was a perfect housekeeper even though she had a full time job outside our home. I know that she took pleasure in orderliness and I have tried, fairly unsuccessfully, to emulate her in my own housekeeping. I'm getting better at it. I like, for instance, to iron. I know, I know, but I do like it! I like the smell of the steamy, clean clothes, the glide of the iron over the surface of the garment as it presses out the wrinkles and the quiet rhythm of the work. I wouldn't want to do it for a living, but it's not a terrible way to spend an hour on a gray afternoon.

One of my friends once asked me when I was between jobs what I enjoyed most about being free all day. I astonished myself by saying that, aside from being able to spend more time with my daughter, I loved being able to finish a load of laundry from beginning to end: wash, hang out on the line to dry, fold and put away, without feeling like it was just one more task I had to rush through. And I think she astonished herself by saying, "I know what you mean!"

I think we all, on some level, long for the time to be able to do things the right way - a little stab at bringing order to our world.

Frost Heave

The Maine landscape is entering its unlovely phase. On our drive out to lunch yesterday there was no escaping the dismal: dreary trailers, plow-rucked yards and, in the fields, abandoned vehicles muffled in drifts. Dirty snow lay along the verges, salt frosted passing cards, potholes and frost heaves roller-coastered our drive. Maine's slip was certainly showing and its stockings both had runs.

But here and there a glimpse of the beautiful: a view of the Camden Hills, still looking mistily fresh- snow-powdered and stately across the water; the reflection of a blue-painted porch ceiling against the white walls of a house; a spray of bright red rose hips rising from the drifts along the road.

We're color-deprived at this time of year. We emerge from our holes, pale and blinking, and a sea of white and gray - snow, sky, ocean - nearly blinds us.

On the Reach at low tide the sea ice cracks and subsides over boulders. Seaweed, crisp with rime, supports the busy gulls who never seem to feel the cold. Clammers bend over the flats and in the wind the leaden water crinkles like foil.

Really, it's no time to be here. We're isolated by inertia and the acres of ice in the dooryard and driveway. Snow piled in alpine heaps at crossroads make it difficult to see oncoming traffic; black ice along darker stretches lies in wait.

Some find refuge in seed catalogs and it is lovely to dive in on yet another relentlessly gray day and swim in visions of scarlet runner beans, Empress of India nasturtiums, ruby chard, sunflowers, broom corn, larkspur, sweetpeas and strawberries. At such times, it's wise to guard against ordering too much, staving off the inevitable dismay, late March, when too many boxes of seeds and plants arrive.

By this time of the winter there's a sag to the seat of the part of the couch that faces the windows overlooking the water. Every morning (and most of some afternoons) I sit there, strangely comforted by the sameness of the view, waiting for the first soft morning, surely not far off, when I can plump up the cushions and step out into Spring.