Of spring, plowing, dandelions and the urge to "verse"

April's column for East Village Magazine:

About this time of year, the days lengthening and the last crusts of blackened snow finally melting, my dad used to get overtaken by an uncompromising compulsion. He had to get out and plow some dirt.

My mother found it endearing. She understood he needed to set aside his preacher garb and dig out his overalls from the year before. My parents didn’t always get along but in early April they companionably united in answering the pull of their garden plot. Even if the humus was still a little frosty, they’d be cheerfully harmonious, at least through the planting, with the promise of their crops.

My mother’s bow to spring meant scavenging for early dandelion greens, which she considered a necessary tonic to perk us up after winter’s depletions. She’d toss the greens together with vinegar, a little sugar, chopped bacon and an egg and serve us several rounds of rejuvenating wilted dandelion. When we moved from the country to the city, she complained she couldn’t find enough early dandelion the dogs hadn’t peed on. She never trusted city greens.

But come the springtime planting season, I’m awkwardly reminded I’m no farmer. I didn’t get the gene.

I’m a “political gardener” like I’m a “political lesbian.” That is, I’m happy to support lesbians and gardeners and I’ll do whatever I can to back their rights and clear their path across and over obstacles. I earthily admire and respect their life progressions.

But it’s always second hand for me: I’m not a gardener and I’m not a lesbian, more’s the pity.

(Wait…how did lesbians get into this? I’m treading dangerously close to well-meaning faux pas. So allow me to drop the Sapphic analogies and get back to gardening. In conclusion, if you’re a lesbian gardener, especially of the metropolitan variety, let me just say you have met my criteria for urban goddess. )

Me, I’ve always connected gardening with being grown up: if you grow your own, you understand the world. You depend on no man or woman but yourself; you take responsibility for your primal needs, you cope with the vagaries of drought, flood and pestilence. You know that not all shoots survive. You know you have to prune, sometimes ruthlessly, to fortify what remains.

I remember several years when my parents’ most cherished crop, fresh strawberries, got flooded out in the bottomland they’d persistently tried to recover. They added truckload after truckload of purchased dirt, but still it often wasn’t enough. I remember their moaning distress at the loss of their first hopes.

But if they were lucky, disaster struck early and they could start again. Sometimes, though, they’d simply say, “well, this isn’t going to be a good year for strawberries. But just wait…it’ll be the year for something.” And they were almost always right: after the strawberries tanked, maybe it would be potatoes thriving in their dark nests, or the cantaloupe would be especially juicy, or the Peaches and Cream corn would be the sweetest yet.

I suppose you’re concluding, and rightly so, that the most I learned from growing up with gardeners was how to craft analogies. I suppose that’s something. The rest is sadly lost on me. When I get the urge to garden I bring back pots from Home Depot that I then plop into other pots. And then I forget to water them, or I forget to deadhead, deliciously morbid spondee, or I forget to ask somebody to tend them when I’m out of town. I think this means I’m unevolved.

One thing I’m good at: somebody found slugs in my marigolds, and told me you could round them up with beer. That I do extremely well: I pour whatever brew I have on hand into little dipping dishes and plant them in the dirt in flower boxes. This Final Solution sort of horrifies me, especially my own guilty pleasure in counting soggy corpses of a morning. It’s downright Shelley-esque the way they die, and sort of poetic in the interest of yellow blooms.

In short, when springtime comes my only plowing is these words, line after line after line. It’s a kind of gardening, a hopeful patience as close as I get to making something flower.

In truth, in April I often feel the urge. My restlessness aims at making verse, a word derived directly from the plowman. In Latin it means to turn at the end of each row, and then to turn again, and then to turn again, making things straight and readying the earth for springtime growth.

My father used to say if you wanted to plow a row straight you couldn’t look down or back. You had to keep your head up, looking straight ahead. My mother said in spring you needed dandelions. Between the two, there’s truth aplenty there to get me going on the page, at least till May.

The Hardest Part

...of being a teacher is grading, and I've just finished off the end-of-semester marathon: 14 fiction projects, 14 final personal essays, and 45 freshmen papers. The last round of the semester is especially difficult: one evaluates not just the last piece of writing, but the student's whole semester, aiming to come up with a final number for class participation as well as for the class. And of course, one evaluates onesself.

So many decisions. I feel my forehead furrow even as I write this in a moment of breathing and debriefing.

Yes, I'm aware I have to really work on my breathing while grading -- I tend to tighten up, tense up, hunch up...an old, unhealthy habit I fell into long ago when working hard. Now I'm picturing my yoga teacher admonishing me to throw back my shoulders -- sit up tall!, she says. Or as my beloved therapist said gently all last spring, "it's okay to breathe..." This matters, I've gradually come to understand. Grading is a process of hard truths: grading is the field and the farmer both -- the humus scrutinized for depth and health, the farmer taking a taste of the soil, like my dad used to do, and taking a measure of what's there. Did we seed with enough rye grass? Is it getting enough oxygen and drainage? Is it too alkali?

Funny to be thinking about my dad standing in his much-fussed over little plot down in Ohio decades ago. But I see the instinctive rightness of this analogy for me. There's a cycle to it -- a cycle of planning, high hopes, constant tending, the frenzy of planting and harvest, then the hard realities: the strawberries just didn't make it. The rabbits got into the lettuce. The beans are diseased. The tomatoes never ripened up right. But those potatoes -- what a crop! And how will we deal with all those glossy green zucchini? Did you ever taste such sweet cantaloupe? Welp, I can hear him saying, there are a few things I'll have to do differently next year.

Over the past couple of years, I've become a tougher grader. I'm on the alert about this: part of me wary of advancing codgerly despair at the lunkishness of the young. But another part of me argues it is right to demand something of the younger generation. I want to say to them (and do -- probably more often than I should) , "Pay attention, dammit. Some of this stuff matters. Wake up!"

So I anguish over individual situations that I know affect my students' performance. Was I too hard on the one who's pregnant? Was I too hard on the one I got into a kerfuffle with midway through the semester because he loudly complained about the book I'd chosen -- and then proceeded to give me some of the worst writing I've ever received in a fiction class? Was I too rough on the kid whose thinking sparkles but whose proofreading is horrible -- knowing that she grew up in foster homes? Was I too easy on the eager kid who did okay, not great, because I know his mother was in jail? Was I too easy on the one who praised me and shared my political beliefs? Did I bend over backwards for the one who quoted Glenn Beck and was watching for any sign of liberal bias? How to keep the head clear and focused on the text: the paragraph after stumbling paragraph rolling out on that screen.

We only had 14 weeks together -- not nearly enough to really learn to write. Or for me to concentrate on these individuals before me, focusing on their complications, their needs, their resistance to learning.

It is not a question of whether I am objective or subjective, but rather a question of how subjective I am and in what direction. Even within the system of criteria, rubrics and points I have devised with few illusions, the matter of how many points I dole out has at least a partly visceral dimension. With writing there is hardly a cut-and-dried system, at least not that I am ready to embrace. Some of it is intuition -- and thus the perils of teacherly misuse of power.

But then again, my job is to try to help my students be better writers, not to solve all their late-adolescent life crises. So it probably doesn't help much to give them a break if they don't deliver what I think they need to know. It doesn't help them, I say primly, and it doesn't stand as good teaching. That's what I say to myself when I make the hard calls: give 'em consequences -- build the connection between what they do and what happens to them as a result. Good old Skinnerian behaviorism. But then, but then, writing IS life. All those complications, all those complexities -- they're what feed and challenge the writer. Tra la, tra la.

So, my body achy and craving relief, I fill the bathtub with the hottest water I can stand and invite my husband in for a long chat. "The point of life is learning how to adapt so you can survive," my husband reflects, the steam puffing at our faces. Our tub is big enough for us to sink in up to our armpits with heaps of bubble bath on top of that, our knees white Pyrenees. Used this way, the two of us sharing it, facing each other, our legs intertwined, the hot water lasts far longer than a quick and thoughtless shower, and it does us both good to take our time. It's something we've learned.