The reality and rhythm of pea-planting.

October 10, 2024my garden, realityaphorisms, Chartwell, flexibility, G.K. Chesterton, gardening, Hearth and Field, hurry, peas, waste, Winston ChurchillGretchenJoanna

I was thrilled when my newly planted peas came up within a few days. That was one benefit of the Hot Week, when it was over 100 degrees for many days in a row. The seeds were bedded in a temporarily partly shady place behind the zinnias and parsley, so the earth stayed moist.

They are petite and very cute, growing close together next to the tall trellis where I planned to train them upward… until after they were up I read online, and then confirmed it by checking the packet, that Sugar Ann snap peas are a Bush Type of plant, and typically grow only 1-2 feet tall. I have grown peas for more than half my life, so why would I have read the description and instructions?? The packet had been a kind gift a few months ago from Hearth and Field; my thought process on rediscovering them in my box of seeds went quickly from “Oh, goody!” to “Must plant these right away!” and I did that very efficiently.

Efficiency is not one of the guiding principles of Hearth and Field, however, and I should have embarked on my pea project more in the spirit and manner of the vision expressed on the website of that journal:

Welcome to Hearth & Field!
We are the only journal you’ll find
that makes the internet move
at the pace and rhythm of real life.

Hearth and Field also quotes G.K. Chesterton at the top of that home page, saying,

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

I don’t have time to think more about how that second quote relates to my peas. [Update: I originally put something here about Winston Churchill’s Chartwell peas, which I attributed to Chesterton, which is very embarrassing, and there is no way to fix it, so I removed it. Thank you to my blessed reader Amy who noticed.]

In Real Life, “Haste makes waste,” right? But that motto doesn’t convey quite everything about how I will need to spend an extra hour today that I was not planning on. I will transplant those little starts to the middle of the planter box, so as to free up the trellis for planting Green Beauty snow peas from Baker Creek, because it would be a waste of my beautiful trellis to do otherwise. This is how “the pace and rhythm of real life” works in real life!

Green Beauty pea blossom from February 2021

Flying at Night

October 8, 2024poetryair travel, night, sky, Ted KooserGretchenJoanna

Back in May, I wrote about how I had been given a nighttime airplane ride with my son-in-law as pilot. I have had the experience on commercial flights, too, and found it enthralling whenever we were flying low enough to see the patterns of lights down below. I wonder if I will have that chance again…

FLYING AT NIGHT

Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.
Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies
like a snowflake falling on water. Below us,
some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death,
snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn
back into the little system of his care.
All night, the cities, like shimmering novas,
tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.

-Ted Kooser

Let the day grow on you upward.

October 5, 2024nature, poetryDerek WalcottGretchenJoanna

Is this poem about death, about a body laid to rest in the grave? In particular the line about ants walking over the eyelids makes me think so.

EARTH

Let the day grow on you upward
through your feet,
the vegetal knuckles,

to your knees of stone,
until by evening you are a black tree;
feel, with evening,

the swifts thicken your hair,
the new moon rising out of your forehead,
and the moonlit veins of silver

running from your armpits
like rivulets under white leaves.
Sleep, as ants

cross over your eyelids.
You have never possessed anything
as deeply as this.

This is all you have owned
from the first outcry
through forever;

you can never be dispossessed.

-Derek Walcott

Threads strung across everything.

October 3, 2024nature, quotesautumn, John Stewart Collis, re-post, spiderwebsGretchenJoanna

“Time marched on. Each day seemed long, each week short. It was already autumn. What is the salient characteristic of autumn? The spiders’ threads in the early morning frost. I am not thinking much of the circular networks, marvellous as these are, hung along the gate, but rather the threads that are strung across everything, so that if you bend down till your eye is level with the field you can see a white veil over the whole expanse. They are everywhere, on everything. ‘Do they drape the cannons in France?’ asked Mr Ralph Wightman, true poet, in a striking image, the other day. To look down at these things is like looking up at the stars — we are baffled by quantity.”