March Madness

It’s not solely the affliction of bracket-toting basketball lovers. We gardeners suffer from March Madness, too. Daily, like inmates, we peer hungrily from the windows. Breaking out, we traipse onto ground barely begun to soften. Where snow has melted, we scour the terrain for the first crocus or snowdrop. As the month winds down, we search for hellebores gathering green or daffodils pushing upward miniscule nubs. Even a fetid skunk cabbage shouldering forth its thick fleshy spathe earns a high five, as if it's sunk a game-winning three-pointer in the final second.

But then, of course, it happens. Our favorite team is routed by the underdog. Another snowstorm sweeps through. A dip below freezing lasts for days. The brackets are jettisoned, the TV remotes shelved. We gardeners reach again for the gardening catalogues that, with a predictability spring never confers, arrive each January and colorfully glut our mailboxes in their post-holiday emptiness. We’re reduced again to planning, dreaming, dog-earing more pages.

That is, unless you’re a vegetable gardener.  

While we flower-and-shrub types must wait on the sidelines and cool our heels, vegetable gardeners no longer merely sit and drool over glossy centerfolds of hot piquillo peppers and scantily clad Early Girls lolling beside the robust fingerlings and Brandy Boy beefsteaks. Now’s the time to get out seed starters, grow mats and fiber packs, to rig up cold frames.

I descend from women whose gardens were ones of beauty not utility. Where my mother’s spotted orange tiger lilies grew along our white fence, and in mulched beds beneath my bedroom window, fragrant Peace roses, crepey, fist-sized mounds of peach against red brick, demanded attention. At my grandmother’s, an arbor of lilacs spilled forth in June and later, in her small yard, towering hollyhocks hogged the show, shielding from view the alley and garbage cans, the driveway where my grandfather tinkered under his Pontiac’s hood.

I’m still a dedicated flower-and-shrub gal though my garden is no formal affair. It features no clipped boxwoods, no meticulously symmetrical beds. I don’t lavish time on tea roses. My aesthetics are basic: taller spires at the rear, diminutive mounds in front, green and silver, lacy and coarse-edged foliage texturing the mix. Once, I tried vegetables – a novice’s tip-toe attempts. Peas climbing (tangling, actually) up a trellis, tomatoes staked in cages. That was the season of ravenous hornworm and powdery mildew, of diligent feeding and hoeing that produced sunscald in a hot spring and watery pulp in the rainy summer that followed. The following year, I abandoned my initial ambitions for potted herbs on the deck and the easier fecundity of cherry tomatoes which, by the time mid-September rolled around, had nearly worn out their welcome. Since, I harvest what I need at the weekly farmers’ markets.

Lately though, I’ve been threatening to give vegetables another go, just as other friends have increasingly done with raised beds and hoop houses. The whole shebang. Maybe, as I start to spend more of the growing season on the island, I’ll wade back in, take a few first steps that help keep March madness in check. That transform centerfold into something I can sink my teeth into. Maybe.

Either way, come summer, I’ll be blessed with bounty, thanks to the island’s farmers’ markets and to living in a region brimming with farmers, growers, producers and harvesters. Who are joined by cheese-makers and bread-bakers, by folks who tap their own maple sugar sap, who keep free-range chickens and pigs, tend wild blueberry barrens and cultivate acres of apple trees.

That doesn’t mean my fingers don’t itch to get back into dirt this time of year. More than my thumbs green with envy as my vegetable gardening pals prepare to transplant and sow. Still, as March tips into April, I’m finding satisfaction in another, somewhat-related task. I’m harvesting poems. “Food” poems.

It’s a type of early prep, too. For what in August will be another poetry event I’ll curate for Opera House Arts, one part of a two-day celebration commencing with the showing of Maine Farmland Trust’s “Meet Your Farmer,” a documentary featuring eight portraits of diverse Maine farmers who grow, produce and harvest products they sell directly within their local communities.

This week, I set aside the richly endowed catalogues, and instead of their glossy photos, I focused on poetry’s bounty. On the images black-and-white words on a page paint in my head. How words and sounds on the tongue nourish, feed body and mind. What through attentive eye and ear encourages active participation, discourages passive consumption.

Consider, for example, poet Bruce Guernsey summoning the yam as “The potato that ate all its carrots,” the one that can see in the dark like a mole and because it hates the light “is pawing its way, padding alone,/there in the catacombs.” Or how Bill Matthews in “Onions,” declares, “How easily happiness begins by dicing onions.” It’s the best domestic perfume, he claims, when you sit down to eat “with a rumor/of onions still on your twice-washed/ hands and lift to your mouth a hint/of a story about loam and usual/endurance.”

In “An Insider’s View of the Garden,” Maxine Kumin can’t help but admire “the ever perseverant/unquenchable dill that sways like an unruly crowd at a soccer match/waving its lacy banner/where garlic belongs” or while slyly invading a hill of Delicata squash. She lauds the “army of brussel sprouts/extending spoon-shaped leaves over dozens of armpits/that conceal what are now merely thoughts, mere nubbins/needing long ripening.”

In “How to Stuff a Pepper,” I welcome Nancy Willard’s observation: “Perched on green buttocks, the pepper sleeps.” And, as a lover of Yukon Golds and Maine’s own Kennebecs, I like to think of potatoes the way Linda Hogan does. The way “all summer potatoes grow in silence,/gentle,/moving stones away.”

I wonder if other islanders experience some of what I observe in my poem, “The Season’s First Apples” – when early apple varieties first appear on farmstands with late corn and tomatoes. A time of year when nowhere in my radio’s broadcast is there a forecast of snow, when the wind is still disguised in the stillness of trees, the luffing sails in the harbor, and though there’s no need yet for socks or sweater, “at the sounds/of my first bite of the season’s first apples/boots crunch through icy layers” and “frozen tree limbs stutter/against the roof and gutters.”

Eagerly, I oblige Carol-Muske Dukes who asks us to imagine for a moment “the still life of our meals,/meat followed by yellow cheese,/grapes pale against the blue armor of fish.” I appreciate how bounty for Billy Collins in “Osso Bucco” is “the sound of the bone against the plate/and the fortress-like look of it/lying before me in a moat of risotto.” And the recognition that while elsewhere, people of all nations stare at one another across a long, empty table, on this night “the lion of contentment/has placed a warm, heavy paw” on his chest.

For Joy Harjo, “The world begins at the kitchen table.” It is where “gifts of earth are brought and prepared.” Babies teethe at its corners. Growing up, we scrape our knees under it, “are given instructions on what it means to be human.” Our dreams, she tells us, “drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children.” At the table, we sing with joy, and with sorrow. We put ourselves back together once again. We give thanks. We remember.

Yam or apple or lilac, in passed-on recipes or handed-down vases. So much that winds up at the table begins in dirt, is of or in or returned to the earth, is home to our hungers and satisfactions, to our madnesses and yearnings. All making it possible to consider, as Harjo suggests, “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.”