The Planting Bird

I can’t remember a spring when I wasn’t ready to embrace it, meet it head on. Maybe it’s because we’ve all been sick since early February; maybe it’s the long-term sleep deprivation that comes as part of the package with a new baby. Maybe it was the five woodchucks that had their way with my vegetable garden all last summer. They showed the way to eleven deer, and the 16 of them laid waste to everything. The mesclun lettuce mix went first, chewed to the ground. Though their leaves were too prickly to eat, the zucchini and summer squash fruits were eagerly consumed. The tomato plants and their fruit simply disappeared. Even the jalapeno peppers were reduced to stems, festooned with cheery green and red peppers. My plans for making Sungold Salsa as a Christmas present for my extended family withered with the drought and the animal onslaught. The garden, started with such high hopes, looked as though someone had taken a weed-whacker to it. I couldn’t even get a salad out of it.

By mid-winter, I was finally ready to order that 8’ high anti-deer mesh, ready to sink almost $500 into protecting a meager 16 x 32’ garden. I didn’t want to calculate the cost per tomato; I’d already spent so much on soil and lumber for the raised beds, on 4’ high fencing to stop the rabbits and woodchucks (the latter blithely climbed it). No, the garden makes no economic sense whatsoever, and I know that. But I can’t put a value on being able to plant and grow my own fresh produce, to be free, at least for a couple of months, of the dismal, chemical-drenched, tasteless provender that stacks the grocery bins. To walk out of a summer evening and stuff myself with sugar snap peas; to fill the front of my shirt with little tangerine-colored Sungold tomatoes; to toss them into a bowl of hot pasta coated with my own pesto and call it dinner: that is something without price.

I still couldn’t look at the garden plot, though, marred as it was with deer tracks and the stubs of last year’s plants. So when an April Saturday came with a balmy breeze, laced with the scent of blooming red maples and wet earth, I climbed atop our birdwatching tower and faced west, away from the garden plot. It was too depressing to think about. And a song drifted up from the old orchard, of notes in pairs, seemingly distant, yet curiously close. "Pick it up, pick it up. Drop it, drop it. Cover it, cover it. " The brown thrasher was back. My father always told me he was the planting bird. He came when it was time to plant peas, and he told you how to do it.

I swiveled my scope onto the hidden thrasher, and drank him in. A rusty back, pure burnt sienna, a gray cheek, a long, strong bill. An eye the color of egg yolk. He sat still, tail drooping, turning his head mechanically, sending out his message. And I felt my blood stir, and begin to reach my weary brain. It was time to plant the peas. I laughed aloud, sending thanks to this feathered messenger, and hurtled down the stairs to find my work gloves.

Tearing into last year’s stalks, I pulled all the old plants out of the ground and piled them in the middle of the plot. In a ritual as old as time, I lit them, and stepped back to watch the flame flicker, catch, then roar, cleaning out the old to make way for the new. The smoke rolled up blue and thick, and the flames sang as they reached for the sky. I poked and raked and watched until last year’s failures were reduced to white ash.

Next, I went to the garage for the garden plow that had belonged to my German grandmother, Frieda Ruigh. I never look at the plow without seeing her, wearing hose, a flowered dress, and beat-up pumps, pushing it through the rich, dark soil of her Iowa garden. I see her digging new potatoes for the noonday meal, picking strawberries, still in that dress. She’s been gone now for 23 years, but sometimes I still miss her, her thick accent, her dancing eyes and wry smile, so much that I cry.

The plow-such a wellspring of memories. My thoughts shift to my father, who dug it out of her garage when Frieda got to where she could no longer use it. He refinished it, and painted the metal parts John Deere green. When the time came for him to give up his garden, he told me to take it, and as much as I hated to think of his never using it again, I did. Everything I know about gardening I learned at his side. For the first few years, it was mostly weeding, until I took over everything but the planting. He always accused me of watering too much, even as he’d remark on how juicy and tender the tomatoes and beans were. It was the perfect apprenticeship. He got to plant his garden, and he had a willing helper to weed, water, tend and harvest it. And he made me a woman of the soil, just like Frieda. He’s gone now, too, but I see his hands and hear his voice in my mind as I tend my own garden.

Frieda’s plow was naturally left to me, the one with soil in her blood and under her fingernails. It has a little iron wheel out in front, and five sharp recurved tines, and a foot brace. You situate yourself between the long arms of the plow, put your foot on the brace, and go, kind of hop-stepping as you push it with both arms and one leg. Ergonomic, it is not; the handles are clumsy, and the plow depth adjuster sticks up just enough to give you a nickel-sized bruise on your shin as you push it forward. But it does a fine job of loosening the soil and uprooting weeds. I revel in the stands of still-tiny goosefoot that fall before its little blades, thinking of my dad’s admonition: "The time to get weeds is while they’re small." How true! Left to mature, each of those goosefoot plants would get a tap root and a woody stem, and be a two-hand puller within a few weeks.

Two hours flew by under the warm March sun, as I burned and plowed and dug a troweled trench along the back side of the garden. The paper-dry peas rolled from my fingers into the furrow, and I planted a few extra on the side to dig up, so I could check on the progress of their germination. Over the next two weeks, they’d swell and soften, send out a root and finally raise green heads to the sky. A rumble of thunder sounded, and I looked up to see fine white thunderheads piling up against the soft blue sky. Great splashing raindrops sluiced down on me, and I sprinted to the garage doorway to breathe in the fresh ozone smell and watch the soil darken with moisture. "Pick it up, pick it up, drop it, drop it, cover it, cover it..." the planting bird sang. I had let a bird tell me how to spend my Saturday, and that was just fine with me.

Weary but happy, I came back into the house and laid my work gloves on a side table. My eyes fell on a framed photograph, one of only two I have of my grandmother Frieda Ruigh. The year is 1974, and she is making a rare visit from her tiny hometown in Iowa to our home in Virginia. It is her 80th birthday. She is smiling, wearing the hair net she always wore, and there are two lines of pink rouge high above her cheekbones. Next to her is a painting, pushed into a photo frame, the kind with the cardboard triangle behind it that makes it stand up. It is my first real bird painting, the first to find its way into a frame, and I have painted it for her, because it is her favorite bird. She would sit down on the stoop to listen to its song whenever she heard it. The art is primitive, to be sure, with a made-up rose bush for a perch, but it is rendered with the care and conviction of a 16-year-old who knows she’ll paint birds for a living some day. It is a brown thrasher, and it is singing.