Waiting to Grow
You can’t grow tomatoes in the winter. This was an analogy I heard the other day regarding the futility of trying to go about business as usual when our economy is under quarantine. It was being used in a business context, but as a hobby gardener, it struck me as very true. Especially as I’ve been nursing a dozen little, leggy tomato seedlings on my kitchen window sill for several weeks praying for the weather to turn so I can ease them into life outdoors.
My dad used to sing to me as a kid, “Under the leaves and the ice and the snow, waiting, waiting, waiting to grow.” It was the second half of a hymn of which he never seemed to remember the first half.
May in Vermont always stretches on colder and longer than I expect it to. We get a few warm days, the snow melts, the daffodils pop open and the grass begins to green. I excitedly hoe up the vegetable garden and poke lettuce, spinach, Swiss chard, radish and pea seeds into the cold damp soil, but then we get a stray snowfall or a string of frigid days and all I can do is pull on my rubber boots and pace the yard waiting, waiting, waiting for the burst of life that I know is coming.
It will come. The rivers will swell. The vernal pools will erupt with frog song. Little yellow and purple flowers will carpet the meadows. Forsythia will bloom like still-life fireworks. Maybe by the time you read this it will be happening all around you. Because I also forget every year how suddenly springtime arrives when it finally comes. It really does arrive, like a knock on the door from an old friend who walks right in, kicks off their boots, cracks open a beer and makes themselves at home.
Just as surely as springtime will arrive, our arrival out of this quarantine will come. Perhaps not so suddenly or confidently as red breasted robins or unfurling ferns, but slowly we’ll emerge and get back to our full lives once again. It may not be this month, or even the next, and we may have damage to repair from the long, extended winter of COVID, or new ways we want to go about life in this new season to come. Hibernation, be it for winter in Vermont or a health pandemic, is a retreat from public life that lets us rejuvenate and reflect on how we might come back better, stronger.
But watch as the snow-matted grass, the crumpled river banks and the thorny bushes come back to life over the coming weeks until they are teeming with green, wet, buzzy life. We can come back too, when the time is right.
