The Photo: Entropy

Tuesday's Child Is Full of Grace

I planted the last few starters in this year’s garden, a couple of hot peppers, just in time for the heavy rains on Memorial Day. I’ll do a bit of weedwacking and cutting down of some tulip poplar saplings that I don’t think my landlord would want to see grow any taller. But I don’t garden that much now: the yard is small and it’s mostly under part or full shade. I’ve decided to leave the thin strip full of weeds and fallen leaves on the west side of the house alone completely except for those unwanted tree saplings. I’m trying to leave some habitat for fireflies, among other things.

I’ve been paring down my photo catalog again. Here and there I find a series of shots that I haven’t looked at for a while. I can see in early summer 2015 that I was working hard on macro shots of insects, flowers, and some general shots of my garden.

Every time I look at these, I think, “I gotta go do that again. Tomorrow even!” Then I think “Oh, but there’s writing to do. And I haven’t put permethrin on my crawling-around-in-the-meadows clothes yet this season.” Always a reason, but all of its sits up on top of a fact: I’m older, I’m more tired, my momentum angles towards inertia.

I feel even more humbled by my garden back then. Yes, I had a big yard and a lot of full sun on the west side of the yard. But I built 10 raised beds myself, a trellis to walk under with grapevines trained on it, another set of grapevines elsewhere, I was growing blueberries, we had sour cherries early in the summer though the tree eventually died of some kind of disease.

I try to summon the memory of it and some thoughts come across the hearth of my mind. The work of keeping that much planting from getting smothered by weeds was a lot. We had more peas, radishes, lettuce, squash and other crops than the three of us were interested in eating, and though I tried passing some on to other folks, it still felt like a bit much. And I realize that every year of the past decade I’ve accumulated some kind of extra burden at work: department chairing, heading an institute, being on an executive committee, but also a kind of intangible sense of responsibility that no one is really asking me to hold.

I’m also aware as many of us are that the pandemic had an odd stilling effect on me. Some people kicked into physical overdrive, or pushed to make things, do projects, keep busy. I did the opposite.

The images wake me up, though, a buzzing round my soul. So yes, I’ll go out there soon, camera in hand, and see what I can see. But I’ve planted about as much as I want, or am able, and I can’t imagine another year where I labor so much in that way.