White

Last weekend, we were clapboarding. My job was to prime 12-foot lengths of pine clapboards, finished on one side and rough on the other, while J. ripped the worst of the old ones off the house in preparation for the painters. That was Friday, and Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon we started putting them up: a complicated fitting job since they had to be cut into the existing siding. I stood under the ladder and handed things up to J.: an adjustable square, the level, the air-powered nail gun, occasionally the reciprocating saw to cut nail shafts still protruding underneath the edges of old clapboards. On Sunday, as the courses got higher, he set up a scaffold with a plank and ladder-jacks on the extension ladder rungs. By 1:00 pm on Sunday we were finished; an hour later the painters showed up to power-wash the house.

We wore sunscreen, but got tan on our faces anyway in the warm midday sun reflected off the siding. With the help of a little peroxide spray, my hair now has golden highlights and shimmers brightly after the dullness of winter. The prinkly junipers and raspberries and wild roses that I pruned in-between helping-stints scratched up my forearms, but I hardly felt the thorns, it was so glorious being outside.

The cardinals who were trying to nest in the junipers right behind our worksite finally got discouraged and left for a quieter corner of the neighborhood. They weren't the only lovebirds around; it seemed like all the birds were in pairs and cooing and chirping and singing their hearts out, except for a single mockingbird, and the pileated woodpecker who sailed through each afternoon, making a racket. The little red squirrel amused us with his acrobatics in the tops of the maple trees every time we stopped to drink some water. Each night, it seemed, the plants lengthened, extended, unfurled; as I made tea in the mornings and looked down on the garden from the kitchen window there were new shoots emerging, new blooms unfolding, ostrich fern fiddleheads stretching upward.

The sadness I had been feeling about my mother as spring arrived seems to have dissolved over these past few days,a dn been replaced with a kind of calm peacefulness. I can't say that I felt her presence, but I felt her spirit as the sun warmed my back and I noticed and acknowledged the plants and creatures we both loved, raking the leaves from the garden, and feeling the warm earth in my hands. The purple finches and chickadees hopped overhead, singing, and I filled the feeder with niger seed for the goldfinches so I could watch their dipping flight across the garden. I carried water to the birdbath, and transplanted four strong sunflower seedlings that had sprouted underneath its edge. The roses needed food; the hydrangeas and barberries needed pruning; there was plenty of work to be done.

As was true for the children in The Secret Garden, my work of bringing some restorative order to my neglected garden may have done me even more good than the trees and shrubs and flowers, but the plants seemed to appreciate it too. On Monday before we left, the two clumps of trillium - both springtime gifts from my mother, one hand-carried to Vermont, one packed carefully and mailed - were turning their pure white, three-cornered faces to the sun, making me smile.

If this, then -- the shared appreciation, the ongoing conversation, the finding of the departed other in the midst of life -- is the extent of immortality (as she sometimes suspected and I more often doubt), it is still not a small thing.

Comments

[rr]

So lovely that they made you smile.

"Prinkly" made me smile too. What a great word! (intentional or not)

[beth]

Thanks rr -- "prinkly" was a total typo, but I think I'll leave it!

[marja-leena]

So lovely that it made me smile too! The last line touches deeply.

[Pica]

(o)

[Rana]

Ah...

[Dave]

Nice. And is it just my imagination, or is there a bit more greenery here, too?

[Mouse]

I've been thinking a great deal about my mother recently too
Is it necause it's spring, do you think?
Mothers, flowers, re-birth and beauty?

[CdV]

The Secret Garden is an amazing book about loss, re-ordering and connections between people, their environment and the growing world. Love the photos.