The Trouble with Spring

We are farmers. We are many other things as well, but we are farmers. And that basic fact has inescapably changed my view of the world.

For instance, I hate spring. It has its bright moments of course—all the flats of brilliant green tender seedlings popping through soil in the greenhouse, that first whiff of thawing earth in the air, or the rainbow that arcs over the barn as if this one spot is truly magical. The hummingbirds return. But those moments are far outdone by the evil that drives spring weather in Wisconsin and by the steady reveal of winter’s various ravages.

Spring is about loss for me. As the blanketing snow disappears, I see the trees lost to winter’s hungry mice and voles and rabbits, who have been busy girdling trunks, or to antler-rubbing deer, often snapping trunks. I see fewer bulbs in the flower gardens, lost to well-fed moles. I watch our first crops get washed away in downpours. I see a ferocious and vicious stream suddenly grow, sometimes even prettily burbling under our drive for a day or two, before stripping everything in its path the next day in our normally dry valley. I feel wind attacking the cracks and crevices in our old house and barn, hear it squealing as it snatches at anything that isn’t locked down. And I avert my eyes from swirling clouds lest the inevitable funnel decide to show its power just to me. I admire the fox who knows how to keep her new family from hunger even as I mourn the loss of chickens who are too slow, and too reliant on us, to recognize danger. I feel I have failed, am a failure, when I can not protect them, or my plants, or the latest barn cat who is too wild to trust me and too weak to make it without me. When the dogs kill another baby bunny, or my husband dispatches another woodchuck, I mourn their loss even while I recognize the necessity. Spring is hard. And perhaps I do not have the backbone I need to bear such harshness.

But I am nothing if not determined and resolute (or stubborn). So despite what I know spring is doing, I work hard during those months. Thousands of seeds are started, transplanted, tended, coddled. The greenhouse fills. We spend money we don’t have on tanks and tanks of propane. Week-by-week, even day-by-day, plans are concocted for starting more seeds, getting the plants hardened off, getting things out into the fields. My husband is building trellises, plowing, tilling. We restart and replant what washes away, sometimes once, sometimes three times. We spread row cover everywhere, fighting the wind. Hoses snake all over the place because if it’s not raining too hard, it will be dry. Seeds can not be dry. We pray for sun each morning to thaw the ice out.

And eventually, spring gives way to summer. And as a farmer, I start to come into my own. All that work starts to show. The broccoli actually produces enormous blue-green heads. The carrots are startlingly orange after winter’s white and spring’s green. The garlic raises its flower heads in dramatic, tall curls. The daisies fade away and the hot, brilliant zinnias begin their show. The view from my bedroom window shows geometric rows of every shade of green against brown. The lawnmower trims spring’s overblown grass into something neat, something that makes it look as if we have things under control. This is what I like.

I think I may have a problem.