powerless

About mid-January, when I’m mentally wiping my hands and rolling my sleeves back down after the holidays, there’s a sort of time vacuum. What do I do next? I was organized, driven, busy up until we drank the last of the New Year’s Martinelli’s, threw out the Christmas tree, took down the lights. I had so much direction until Father Bird went back to work, the kids started school again...

Into this void comes the seed catalog. Father Bird set it down with the other mail across the room from me during school one day. I could see its glossy cover faintly glowing over there and knew what it was. A couple hundred pages or so of pictures of perfect ripe tomatoes, crisp watermelons cut open, piles of yellow ears of corn. It seems to say to me, “You remember fresh corn, don’t you? Your nose remembers...your teeth remember...”

And the cover picture this year...a barefoot girl with a straw hat astride a wide row of lettuce mix, knife in hand, harvesting the crisp purple and green leaves. Last year the lettuce was my pride and joy.

All this combines to create a siren song that’s almost too much to bear. But do I stuff cotton in my ears and tie myself to the mast of my ship, straining to resist the beckoning that’s sure to drive me to pieces on the rocks?

No. I meekly get out my pencil and calculator, bite my tongue between my teeth, and start making notes. I’ve got to figure just how many of those tomatoes, corn, watermelons I can stuff into my garden this year. I start taking sidelong looks out the window at the brown bare earth and the cold gray day. I can’t even see it. I see myself, straw hat, hoe, blue sky, and lush vegetable plants, just as the seed catalog directed me to.

I know in my mind that things won’t turn out that way. I know there will be bugs, not all of my crops will make, and we’ll battle weeds in the heat and possibly drought all the long hot summer. I know that under the idyllic straw hat is a face streaming with sweat, hands blistered from weekend gardening, and the anguish of “how many more rows??”

But the seed catalog came. And I am powerless.