Forward, March

Take a look at photos of the Hancock Shaker Village high tunnel houses taken a week ago—March 9— and you may well wonder, as I do, if it is right to dub April “The Cruelest Month.” I guess I need spring as badly as anyone in the snow belt at this point. The day I returned and these pictures were taken, it was two weeks later than I expected. Nonetheless, my first job of the farm year was to shovel a path through the snow between the service road and the door of Hoop House 1, where I start most of the plants for our CSA’s cutting and vegetable gardens, and for the Shaker flower seed garden. I was already at least two weeks behind on starting those first seeds—onion, leek, alyssum, and mesclun to plant out in the other hoop house. It took half an hour to attain the door to this belated beginning—not counting the additional ten minutes it took to chip away enough ice and frozen gravel so I could wedge my way inside.

     Once in, I discovered that the snow building up all winter on the sloping roof was pressing dangerously against the plastic sheathing. The rain predicted for that evening would settle into that snow load like a sponge, and by morning, I feared, I’d be looking at snow banks and torn plastic where the trays of seedlings should already be unfurling their first tender shoots. There’s not room in the budget to replace that plastic— a sheet that has to be entirely structurally sound for this passive solar house to be of any use at all.

     Digging the 75-foot length of the south wall to give the snow someplace to slide, I warmed up quickly. The bright blue sky actually seemed almost spring-like. Almost —but for the steady North wind whipping nearby drifts into sharp peaks and lifting powder-fine snow wraiths twirling into the air.

     March this year has so far been oblivious, indefagitible, harsh, unfeeling. The first warm spell, ushered in by that predicted rain, lasted just a couple of days. It was enough to whet my appetite for the sound of melt water and the smell of mud. But that’s my problem, not the month’s. I’m impatient to get on with the year. March takes her time. But I can’t really charge her with outright cruelty. Oblivion to my needs, maybe; but March is tenacious and keeps a firm grip on a winter which, in its own anthropomorphic sense, was nothing if not firm of character.

      “Cruelty” is something else—a cat-and-mouse teasing that seeks to disappoint time after time. Sure, that first whiff of “Mud Season” has me longing for more of the same. But that’s my own weakness showing. It’s weeks, really, before any of us New Englanders can be justifiably disappointed in—or shocked by—strong Northwest winds, persistent snowbanks and even fleecy snowfalls. It’s another week until the official equinox. So March isn’t meant for hoping, not really. It’s a time of waiting; a solemn Advent of sorts, for the fullness to come. March is Austerity. “Cruel” is the ice storm that coats the crocus, the deep freeze that wrecks even the sturdy daffodils; the storm that leaves the hunched robins shivering and hungry. March is austere, trim and watchful. She makes the final clean sweep (if mud can be seen as clean in its pure, inarguable, elemental abundance). She flattens the last of the old season’s dead weeds to make a smooth bed for the birth of meadow grass. She lays out leafy ice patterns as if for practice; brings down the last dead branches from the pines at night. She primes the canvas for the chaos of spring.

     March is thorough, but also not without her small mercies. There is steaming barn muck in the hotbeds. And there, under glass under plastic, the first seedling flats now smell of peat and damp and new life. Let April hold her name as “cruelest” then; March is really the “Truest Month”. The first seedlings have already sprouted up as green as St. Patrick’s Day. The plastic is saved, and the snowbanks are receding. Spring is stirring. It’s too early, in March, for anything but the perfect optimism of anticipation.