January 2009

The merry year is born--
like the bright berry
from the naked thorn.
Hartley Coleridge, English writer (1796-1849)
And so begins another year, and another winter, up on the hill. Although the just-passed holidays seemed to occur, as they always do, outside the normal flow of time, it is inescapable that the river of years carries us all along in its current. And these dark, post-Christmas days make that point with chilly efficiency. We feel older, now that the revelry has passed; we’re sluggish as we rouse ourselves in the still-dark morning, and exhausted as we make our way up the gloomy drive after work. We avoid looking at the calendar, as if that will somehow negate the fact that winter is just getting settled in. Coleridge and his “merry year”? Humbug. Right now, it’s all thorn, and no berry.

Still, since that river of years flows only toward the sea, older is better than the alternative. So, we gather up this year’s new crop of gardening books, Christmas gifts all, and begin dreaming of the coming spring, when the naked thorns will be surrounded by tender shoots, then fragrant blossoms, and finally, bright berries. During these bleak weeks, it is easy to look out on garden beds devoid of leaves, and imagine that we need plants, plants, and more plants to fill in all those empty spaces. But looking through photos from last summer, we quickly remember how full the beds really are, once the plants awake from slumber and dress themselves with foliage.

In fact, it is hard to imagine that these bare and twiggy beds are the same ones pictured in the photos we keep stuffed in drawers and on our hard drives. What’s now brown and grey will soon be green and lush. Today’s rimy, hoary ground will again sport, in not so much time after all, verdant coverings of crocus and daffodil. Although we’ve been diligent about keeping a photographic journal of the changes we’ve made to our property, we’re lacking one key component in its recent history: how the acre looked when we moved in. So, even though we can compare last fall’s garden to the bare-bones beds of our first growing season up on the hill, we cannot, alas, compare it to what we started with. And more’s the pity, as the last traces of that original yard are all but gone, swallowed by the spreading limbs of our young trees and shrubs.

Of course, the river of years would scoff at this hubris, our assertion that the way we found the property when we moved in was some sort of benchmark against which to measure our changes to the landscape, or that it was, in any sense, the “original” state of this hill. The land around all of us is a palimpsest—a page on which words have been written and erased, written and erased—and our efforts will someday go the way of the diseased old plum tree we felled during our first weekend living in this house. The river of years takes us all—people, animals, gardens, even seemingly-timeless mountain ranges.

So, Coleridge is right, after all: it is a merry year, for we are all still here.