JULY 24, 2019 – In these parts, winter can be brutally long. Some people would say brutally wrong, especially last winter, when heavy snow and cold temps slammed us repeatedly all the way into April. We took it on the chin—or wrist, rib, elbow or ankle. When spring finally arrived, it did so reluctantly. Trees, lilacs, flowers and gardens were way behind schedule. This slow advent of spring made us even grouchier than we had been.
Now all that’s behind us, and we’re back on schedule complaining about the heat and humidity. Actually, that’s not entirely true—the complaining part, I mean. We catch ourselves by acknowledging that as much as we’d like to complain, we have no standing to complain about heat and humidity. We know and remind ourselves out loud that with The Fourth of July behind us, winter is not far behind, and we know what happens then.
Meanwhile, however, anything that’s green is growing with a vengeance. Grass, shrubs, vines, trees, tomato plants, flower gardens—they’re all growing as if Nature had laid down an industrial scale spill of Miracle Grow. All this growth caught me off guard, until early one bright sunny, Minnesota morning last week.
As is our custom for all too few weeks of the year, my wife and I sat out on our screened porch at the back of our house. With our coffee suitably gussied up, my wife read (and commented on) the latest news in The Times while I dealt with the early onslaught of email. Suddenly, out of the blue, my wife called my attention to our shrubs along the alley.
“Look at those bushes!” she exclaimed, breaking the morning calm. “They’re totally out of control!”
I looked up from my work. “They sure are!” I said. I was in full accord—aside from knowing that under the circumstances I would be just plain smart to agree. I knew what was coming next. “I’ll have to get out there and prune them,” I said, before she could say, “You’ll have to get out there and prune them.”
I’ve since spent a solid couple of hours at it. I pretended I was Gulliver giving haircuts to Brobdingnagians. To access the very tops of their heads, I had to stand high up on a tall stepladder. No matter which side I put it on, the tallest hair—standing straight up—seemed to be on the opposite side of the Brobdingnagian’s head. I’d then position the ladder on the other side of the head, only to have the tallest hair move, it seemed, back to the side on which I’d just been trimming.
Some of the shoots were three feet long. Just four months ago, those shrubs were bare and lifeless in the snow-filled cold. Now, drawing power from the sun and nutrients from the soil, they had grown at a turbo-charged rate.
As I clipped and snipped, I heard no complaining. I saw only vibrancy, resilience and their answer to winter: the growing season.
© 2019 Eric Nilsson
