Pruning
Housatonic — Between the deep snow and my sewn-together shoulder, I haven’t gotten around to pruning my apple trees. Suckers, which in time will steal the energy and resources of the trees, sprout high and low.
I wish I knew more about pruning. I’ve read about it and studied some puzzling diagrams showing you where and how to make the cuts, but I can’t seem to get it right.
I once heard an old timer say, “You pruning tree as if you hated it.” I’ve taken his homely advice to heart, and feeling stronger and not having to stumble through two feet of snow, I’ll wade into it. It’s also a fair time to do the work, so I believe I’ll be getting to it any day now.
Besides giving me better apples, pruning settles me with useful work and keeps me from doing anything foolishly out of season, or from doing something just plain stupid regardless of the day or month.
Pruning also teaches a fair lesson in this spare season. Thoreau said he “came into this world not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it good or bad.”
It’s a simple thing to become desperate and exasperated with the world and its people and events which I have no power to change. Working outside in the waking world gives me time to contemplate, to realize I’m not charged with changing the world. The best I can do is examine my own life in peaceful, quiet, and solitary labor.
Only then can I prune the maddening from my life, cut short the rush. I can derive quiet and private satisfaction from loving the soft breeze, the warming sun on my face, and from the possible tasks within my small grasp.
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The caress and the lash
March tantalizes us. If you remember your mythology, you’ll remember how “tantalize” derives from Tantalus, who, because he’d offended the gods, was forced to suffer eternally from thirst while standing in a pool of cool water and who was constantly hungry while a fruit-laden branch hovered just over his head. When poor Tantalus bent to drink, the water drained from the pool. When he reached hopefully for a piece of fruit the wind blew the branch out of his grasp.
Though some of us may offend the gods more than others, March made Tantaluses of us all, tormenting us with wind and water – and snow. On any March day, a gentle southeastern breeze carrying cleansing, snow-settling, ice-dissolving rain suddenly could swing around from the Northwest turning the rain to pelting sleet or worse, to heavy, smothering snow.
Schizophrenic March, the lamb and the lion, the caress and the lash. With us knee-deep in cold water and mud, May and June with their explosion of growth and light seem as cruelly unattainable and out of our grasp as Tantalus’s fruit and water.
March tantalized us with a faint promise of bright colors. Some people scratch their itch for color by “forcing” spring flowers to bloom out of their time. They bring buds and sprigs into the house and trick them into flowering. I’ve never tried this trick and don’t think I will. But that’s OK. By my lights, it seems wrong to force plants to bloom before their time. Given March in New England, I guess some people can’t help themselves.
