One of the pleasures of living in Houston for a native Northerner is witnessing the panic that ensues when temperatures drop and snow or freezing rain are forecast. People mob the stores, stockpiling bottled water and toilet paper. Businesses and even public libraries close prematurely. Lines at gas stations snake around the block, sparking memories of the Carter administration.
I’m careful about voicing nostalgia for snow. I know Texans who saw snow for the first time last year and remain traumatized by the memory, though about an inch fell and most of it had melted by the afternoon.
Meanwhile, our thoughts
are elsewhere. We’re planning to build a garden in the backyard and have ordered native
plants and even an olive tree. We want to attract butterflies and hummingbirds,
who already visit the garden in front of the house. We’ll till new plots and
put in tomatoes, beans, basil and flowers. Gardens mingle artifice and nature, with the best maintaining an uncertain balance. I don’t mind weeds among the herbs. The
text for today’s sermon is “Time and the Garden” by Yvor Winters, which begins:
“The spring has darkened
with activity.
The future gathers in
vine, bush, and tree:
Persimmon, walnut, loquat,
fig, and grape,
Degrees and kinds of
color, taste, and shape.
These will advance in
their due series, space
The season like a tranquil
dwelling-place.”
Planning a garden
encourages one to think beyond the moment. There’s a pleasant sense of
anticipation.
“I long to crowd the
little garden, gain
Its sweetness in my hand
and crush it small
And taste it in a moment,
time and all!
These trees, whose slow
growth measures off my years,
I would expand to
greatness.”
For Winters, a garden is
at once real and metaphoric. Poets, too, even the greatest, mature with time
and dedication:
“And this is like that
other restlessness
To seize the greatness not
yet fairly earned,
One which the tougher
poets have discerned—
Gascoigne, Ben Jonson,
Greville, Raleigh, Donne,
Poets who wrote great
poems, one by one,
And spaced by many years,
each line an act
Through which few labor,
which no men retract.”
Winters died on this day,
January 25, in 1968 at age sixty-seven.
2 comments:
I hope your garden is successful. But this is an area where we differ. We are both great readers, but I loathe yard work or gardening of any kind. Battling unwanted bugs and other creatures, the weeding, the heat in summer, etc. Better you than me!
Congratulations on the gardening plans! Due to the building of a new fence by my neighbors (and the relocating of it), I now have a strip two feet wide of additional gardening space all along the side yard, visible from my sun porch (where I do quite a bit of reading these days, vs. the living room sofa, due to a fab recliner I bought last summer). Despite my telling people (and myself) that gardening (along with reading and calligraphy) is one of my three official hobbies, I have found, again and again, that Cal would actually rather READ about gardening than actually be out there doing the thing. There is so much wonderful gardening literature out there - much of it brought to my attention through your Anecdotal Evidence screeds. So thanks again for all those super-satisfying reads!
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