the four seasons always leave me longing
I have been pining for spring ever since the temperatures here in balmy Ohio shifted from biting and bitter, to sunny and slightly less biting and bitter. Every sunny day is something to savor. I pick them out like pale blue beads and hold them in my mind, turning them and dreaming of the slight, subtle changes that herald the return of warmth, the changing of the world. It starts as an almost imperceptible shift in the winds, with a smell that is hard to define. It is wet, earthy and full. It doesn't smell like green growing things yet, that won't start till the soil thaws and the trees bud and the sun shines on the landscape for longer and longer periods of time. But this smell appears, just before that. It is a change in tone from the winter's frosty ice-water pregnant silences.
Ohio summers are supremely hot and humid. I used to hate them, but asI get older, I enjoy them more. Particularly the night. The softening effect that happens during the transition from day to night in summer is sublime. The air is sultry and mellow and there is just something about remembered summer nights that makes my heart happy during the very long cold days of winter. The darkness cottony and enveloping, not at all the sort of dark that haunts winter nights.
Now that I have my own space, the return of spring is even more exciting for me. I have been plotting my garden, marshalling my resources, to turn the area around my little rental property into a lving necklace of green growing things.
A patron gave me an book about gardening in containers and I have been plotting since December about the stuff I am going to grow. I am attempting a new type of cucumber, lemon, which grows as little yellow balls and does better in containers. I am also going to attempt to grow radishes, beets, and carrots as well as a swiss chard (Bright Lights variety, of course. I just found out the the lovely colored stalks of chard are good when they're really young and you can cut them up like celery to add to salads. This is awesome.) Of course I am also going to grow a mesclun loose leaf lettuce mix supplemented with mizuna, arugula, and spinach. When the weather turns too hot for the lettuces, and the spinach bolts, I am going to supplement them with New Zealand spinach and kale. Kale I have been told will grow pretty much until the deadest part of winter and so the prospects of fresh greens for the majority of the year really delights me. I also added nasturtiums, pansies, violas, and marigolds (the edible, non-puffy variety) to the planting rotation as well as all the culinary herbs I have room for. I am absolutely ready for the spring sowing and cannot wait for the first crop of radishes and lettuce, which I can sow at the end of march and will be ready for harvesting, so I am told by those who know, by mid to late April.
The four seasons always leave me longing. In winter, I long for spring and summer. During the heat of summer I yearn for the blaze and fecundity of fall, and during the last glorious gasp of autumn, I long for the cold introspection of winter. I am filled up and hollowed out continuously by the changes of the year and grasping this rhythm and embracing it, rather than fighting it has been a long challenge, but I am starting to mellow and take each change as it comes and to enjoy the differences the changes bring. After all, as long, cold, and dark as winter in Ohio can be, when it is warm, I will miss frozen Lake Erie. During the winter, my lake congeals into an artic wasteland, desolate and cold and unexpected. It is absolutely surreal to glimpse the frozen lake, vast and stretching away into glittering white like some region of the Antartic, dangerous and desolate, when you are in safe, mundane Ohio. But then it thaws, and becomes a shushing, tempestuous beast always wreaking havoc with storms fronts, wreathed in wind and lightening and absolutely beatiful. Whent the waters turn the color of storms and the sky darkens and the trees that surround it are clothed in new growth so green it looks like poison, well that is a sight to take your breath away. It took me a long time to reconcile both those images of Lake Erie and to take them as a whole and love each of them in their season. So yes, I am ready for spring but I know I will miss winter and that is alright.
This entry was originally posted at http://darkelf105.dreamwidth.org/234550.html.
Ohio summers are supremely hot and humid. I used to hate them, but asI get older, I enjoy them more. Particularly the night. The softening effect that happens during the transition from day to night in summer is sublime. The air is sultry and mellow and there is just something about remembered summer nights that makes my heart happy during the very long cold days of winter. The darkness cottony and enveloping, not at all the sort of dark that haunts winter nights.
Now that I have my own space, the return of spring is even more exciting for me. I have been plotting my garden, marshalling my resources, to turn the area around my little rental property into a lving necklace of green growing things.
A patron gave me an book about gardening in containers and I have been plotting since December about the stuff I am going to grow. I am attempting a new type of cucumber, lemon, which grows as little yellow balls and does better in containers. I am also going to attempt to grow radishes, beets, and carrots as well as a swiss chard (Bright Lights variety, of course. I just found out the the lovely colored stalks of chard are good when they're really young and you can cut them up like celery to add to salads. This is awesome.) Of course I am also going to grow a mesclun loose leaf lettuce mix supplemented with mizuna, arugula, and spinach. When the weather turns too hot for the lettuces, and the spinach bolts, I am going to supplement them with New Zealand spinach and kale. Kale I have been told will grow pretty much until the deadest part of winter and so the prospects of fresh greens for the majority of the year really delights me. I also added nasturtiums, pansies, violas, and marigolds (the edible, non-puffy variety) to the planting rotation as well as all the culinary herbs I have room for. I am absolutely ready for the spring sowing and cannot wait for the first crop of radishes and lettuce, which I can sow at the end of march and will be ready for harvesting, so I am told by those who know, by mid to late April.
The four seasons always leave me longing. In winter, I long for spring and summer. During the heat of summer I yearn for the blaze and fecundity of fall, and during the last glorious gasp of autumn, I long for the cold introspection of winter. I am filled up and hollowed out continuously by the changes of the year and grasping this rhythm and embracing it, rather than fighting it has been a long challenge, but I am starting to mellow and take each change as it comes and to enjoy the differences the changes bring. After all, as long, cold, and dark as winter in Ohio can be, when it is warm, I will miss frozen Lake Erie. During the winter, my lake congeals into an artic wasteland, desolate and cold and unexpected. It is absolutely surreal to glimpse the frozen lake, vast and stretching away into glittering white like some region of the Antartic, dangerous and desolate, when you are in safe, mundane Ohio. But then it thaws, and becomes a shushing, tempestuous beast always wreaking havoc with storms fronts, wreathed in wind and lightening and absolutely beatiful. Whent the waters turn the color of storms and the sky darkens and the trees that surround it are clothed in new growth so green it looks like poison, well that is a sight to take your breath away. It took me a long time to reconcile both those images of Lake Erie and to take them as a whole and love each of them in their season. So yes, I am ready for spring but I know I will miss winter and that is alright.
This entry was originally posted at http://darkelf105.dreamwidth.org/234550.html.