ABC

I can tell that spring is here because my lawn and gardens are too wet to do anything with – even though what needs to be done is not really stuff that “NEEDS” to be done but rather (a) things that I could have (perhaps should have) done last October, or (b) work that Jason the spring-cleaning landscaper will do in a week or two (when he can walk without sinking) or (c) stuff I just totally invent to give me an excuse to do stuff.

             

I have talked about (a) before.  It is all of the cutting back of perennial plants that I don’t do pre-winter because the sterile-standing-stems provide shelter for the birds and “add visual interest” to the otherwise barren coldest season.  But mainly it is because not clearing the landscape seems to be sending a message to Mother Nature, but mostly to myself, that in the garden it is never really over – there is always more work to be done.

            

 Jason (b) really will be here soon.  And some of what I would like to be doing right now is admittedly labor that he could be doing when he arrives on the scene with his industrial strength leaf blowers and big-bed pickup truck – that is to say the removal of last year’s leaves from our various perennial beds.  I rationalize however – perhaps wrongly but who cares – that the little incipient buds, which have lain dormant under this bed of intrusive mulch for the past several months, would burst forth in flower much sooner and more healthy if they were exposed to as much spring sunlight is available as soon as possible.  Hence my diligent and gentle wisk-raking – some of which goes into my backyard compost bin, and some onto the lawn to be removed by Jason.

             

This past weekend a portion of our yard was dry enough to do both (a) and (b) in the bed that was formerly our shade garden and now – after the unfortunately necessary removal of several trees – is now our blistering hot sun plot. 

            

 When I finished I looked up into the nearby micro-forest of Rose of Sharon ((Hibiscus syriacus) that has spontaneously sprouted in this newly sunlit environment and pretty quickly spotted (c).

            

 One of the pricker bushes, which a previous owner had planted as a border guard against his neighbor on the south, had a death grip on the largest of our newly arrived, non-violent Hibiscus bushes.  This hostile treatment called for an equally hostile response.  I retrieved my trusty Japanese pruning saw and forty-five minutes and an equal number of thorny branches later I was done.

             

Getting into the spring mood really is as easy as (a), (b), (c).

           

Apprentices In A Craft

William Shakespeare once wrote, "Some are born gardeners, some achieve gardener-ness, and some have gardener-ness thrust upon them." – or something like that.

            

 I am definitely of the “thrust upon” class.

             

Neither my mother nor my father had the slightest interest in working in, or even near, a plot of land whose purpose was the growing flowers, fruit, or vegetables.  I had a couple of Aunts and one Uncle who grew mostly tomatoes in small plots in their backyards and my folks and I occasionally enjoyed some of their produce.  One of the Aunts sometimes watched me afternoons during my elementary school days and she would sometimes take me to pick dandelions from an empty lot across the street from her house.  It was kind of fun.

             

Then we would eat them in a salad.   Not fun.

             

We always lived in rental properties, so my home lawn maintenance experience was nil.  My first such experience was working for the New Britain Parks and Rec department during High School when I mowed the grass at one of the town’s public parks.  That lasted one summer.

             

I did zero horticulturing through college, and for the first ten years of marriage during whichMars and I lived in an apartment in Rocky Hill.  Then we bought our first, and to date only, home in Wethersfield.

             

It came, as expected, with a lawn – not a significant one but at least an hour’s worth of walking behind the mower each time.  It also came, unexpectedly to me anyway, with a bevy of bushes and other unidentifiable (some to this day) shrubbery.  When I say unexpectedly I mean I saw them when we looked over the property and liked the look that they gave to the yard within which I saw myself lazing in my lawn chair during warm summer days.  It somehow hadn’t occurred to me that they grew – continuously.

             

And then there was the vegetable garden.  Mars’ father was an inveterate gardener, and a good one.  The backyard garden was just a fact of life for her.  So on our first Memorial Day weekend of home ownership, following my father-in-law’s directions and Mars’ plans, we dug up and planted our first of many vegetable gardens.  Much to my surprise this enterprise turned out to be the easiest of my horticultural challenges.

             

But also there was “Ernest” – the name that I gave to the guy who took care of my neighbor’s yard work because of his physical resemblance to the macho American novelist.  I still remember the first time I saw him.

             

He looked to be of retirement age, about six feet tall, and thin.  He was wearing clean, un-pressed tan chinos, brown work boots, a yellowing Irish knit sweater and a tan chino baseball hat.  The hat was planted firmly on his head, at a slight angle, with the left side up.   

A thin stream of white hair flowed out of the sides of the hat and continued down his cheeks, merging with a short-trimmed beard and moustache.  His neck was unshaven.  When he removed his hat, I could see that the hair on his head was military short.  It was a sunny day, but Ernest didn't wear sunglasses.   

He squinted (even in the shade provided by the long peak of his cap).  As he worked he removed layers.  First he took off his sweater to show a clean plain-white tee shirt.  Then the tee shirt came off to show an upper body, tanned and largely free of fat - but not muscular.

             

He worked continuously, pausing only for three things: to remove a layer of clothing, to take off his hat and wipe his forehead, or to smoke a cigarette.  He sat and smoked between jobs.  Between grass cutting and grass raking.  Between hedge trimming and hedge raking.  And before leaving. 

            

 The tools Ernest used were basic: a small, generic brand push power mower, hand operated pruning shears and a metal rake with several teeth missing.  His cigarettes, I surmised from the size of the pack, were either unfiltered "regular size" Camels (my father's brand) or Lucky Strikes (my former one).  The right hand that held the cigarette was always cupped.  He rested that hand on his left wrist and rested the left wrist on a crossed right leg.  He was very still when he smoked, except for his cupped hand slowly floating up to his mouth and back.

             

When he was done the lawn was uniformly short and clean, and the hedges were squared-off and flat.  He put his tools away and rode off on a blue one-speed bicycle, with his Irish knit sweater stuffed into a rusty handlebar basket.           

For eight years, during the yard-work season, Ernest came at least every other Sunday on that same two-wheeler to do his work. And virtually every time, and most Saturdays too, I was in my own yard trying to do the same. It wasn't in me to give my yard the squared-off look of Ernest's handiwork.  Instead I chose a less symmetrical layout, requiring much more intensive labor. 

             

As I pushed my mower, hand-turned my old and new gardens, or dug out my dandelions, I would stare over to see how I was doing compared to him - frequently at first, then less often. 

             

But I never totally stopped looking. 

             

As the real Hemingway wrote, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.”

Quién Santa Fe?

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If you went to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the first time you might think that the patron saint, and official icon, of the capitol city of the “Land of Sunshine” is the Virgin of Guadalupe.  And you might wonder, who is this Saint Fe anyway?

            

First the V.O.G.

             

“Official Catholic accounts state that on the morning of December 9, 1531, a native American peasant named Juan Diego saw a vision of a maiden at a place called the Hill of Tepeyac, which would become part of Villa de Guadalupe, a suburb of Mexico City. 

             

“Speaking to him in his native Nahuatl language (the language of the Aztec empire), the maiden asked that a church be built at that site in her honor. From her words, Juan Diego recognized the maiden as the Virgin Mary. He then sought out the archbishop of Mexico City, Fray Juan de Zumárraga, to tell him what had happened. The archbishop instructed him to return to Tepeyac Hill, and ask the lady for a miraculous sign to prove her identity.

             

“The first sign she gave was the healing of Juan's uncle. The Virgin also told Juan to gather flowers from the top of Tepeyac Hill, which was normally barren, especially in December. But Juan followed her instructions and he found Castilian roses, not native to Mexico, blooming there. The Virgin arranged the flowers in his tilma or cloak, and when Juan Diego opened his cloak before archbishop Zumárraga on December 12, the flowers fell to the floor, and on the fabric was the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe.” (Wikipedia)

 In Santa Fe this patron saint of (Old) Mexico appears ubiquitously on T-shirts, watches, bracelets, key chains, paintings, murals and even tattoos.  Mars and I have several such images in our own collection – clothing, pictures and jewelry.

             

“Use of those images ‘is an expression that brings the sacred to everyday life,’ said theologian Nancy Pineda Madrid, a professor at the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry at Boston College. ‘Having her with us is a way to feel more secure, more confident in life, especially when we have problems or are in danger.’ (http://www.catholic-sf.org)

             

Apparently this is true of both those who have a deeply religious devotion to the Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as those who venerate the image and its cultural and aesthetic countenance more than the spiritual backstory.

            

 So how come, you ask, is the image of Saint Fe not equally ubiquitous?

            

 Well the short answer is, there is no Saint Fe.  (Some would argue that there also was never a Juan Diego – although the Vatican canonized him as the first Roman Catholic indigenous saint from the Americas in 2002.  Whatever.)

             

There was however a Saint Francis.  And “the city Different” was originally called “the La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís  ("The Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi")” – way too many letters for a baseball cap, so the town was rechristened to the much shorter Santa Fe.

             

The Roman Catholic cathedral in downtown Santa Fe is “The Cathedral Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi”.  It was built by Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (the Archbishop to whom death comes in the Willa Cather novel) between 1869 and 1886. An older church, built in 1626 in the same location, was destroyed in the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. 

             

But the Franciscan icon that always draws my interest and attention when Mars and I are in town lies just about diagonally across the plaza in a small, street-corner park.  The statue of Saint Francis and the prairie dog is one of our favorite public art pieces and one spot that must be visited (and photographed) on each and every one of our trips.   

             

(The rodent's red body-wrap is not normally a part of the image.  That’s a Mars-knitted scarf lent briefly by me to the stone-cold burrowing rodent for artistic purposes.  In spite of the snow the weather was such that my scarlet neckwear was more decorative than functional.)

            

 I’ve been finding images of Francis of Assisi floating into my mind frequently during this past winter – the secular, animal-loving one as opposed to the voluntarily impoverished, barefooted, clad in rough cloth mendicant who found the Franciscan order of monks – mostly when I’ve been outside in the unkind elements dispensing food to (presumably) struggling tiny creatures of the wild. 

            

 Most recently for example – I was re-clearing the path across the front lawn to our bird feeder complex after our latest snowstorm when I noticed a winter-green goldfinch hanging tentatively onto our upside-down thistle feeder.  He was the only bird in sight – the other multitudes having scattered to the nearby bushes and trees at the first crunch of ice crystals under my thick-soled hiking boots.

             

I stopped shoveling.  He ceased eating.  We exchanged gazes.  I resumed my shoveling – slowly and quietly.  He continued his staring – turning his neck as I passed him by in a way impossible for us humans to do, while still maintaining his claw-hold on the perforated aluminum feeder tube.  We came within inches.  Finally, moments after I worked my way past him, he flew hesitantly off in that bobbing-in-the-air style of flight unique to those tiny- seed-eating songbirds. 

             

We were that close to having what the philosopher Martin Buber called an “I-Thou connection” - a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.  Then poof, he was gone!   It was probably something that I didn’t say.  Or maybe, in the subzero temperatures of that day, he was hoping that I might offer him my cozy, warm, red, woolen muffler.

            

 I did mention that I wasn’t attracted to the physically discomforted aspects of Saint F of A’s demeanor – didn’t I?

             

             

                       

High – And Dry Too!

Mars and I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico for the Christmas holiday.  Our daughter-in-law and son live there.  She is the daughter of a Master Gardener and an avid, very good plants-woman in her own right.  Our son learned from me and therefore provides muscle when and where he is directed.

             

There was however nothing horticultural going on while we were there – except what transpires secretly under the earths’ surface during its supposedly dormant season.  Despite its tropical sounding name, northern New Mexico (even with its more southerly latitude) is just about as plant-friendly during the winter months as southern New England.

             

The reason?  Particularly out west, altitude equals latitude.

             

A good “rule of thumb” for elevation’s effect on climate (even on the east coast) is 1,000 feet of altitude = 300 miles of latitude = 4 degrees F in temperature.  Here is a “small math” example. Santa Fe is forty miles north of Albuquerque and 2,000 feet higher.  So it is usually about 8.5 degrees cooler.   Wethersfield, CT has an altitude of forty-five feet above sea level.  Santa Fe is about 7,000 feet at its lowest – more than enough to eliminate any temperate effects of Northern New Mexico's more southern latitude.

             

As a result the Santa Fe area has between 150 to 180 frost-free days with the last frost occurring usually between April 20 and May 10.  By comparison CT has around 210 days with a slightly earlier end to the freezing season.  To make matters worse, Santa Fe’s annual rainfall is a measly14.21 inches.  (New Mexico does have some similarities to the country from which it borrowed its name.) CT averages over four times that amount.

             

The story of New Mexico is in large part the story of water – who owns it, who needs it, and how to distribute it.  In rural areas this was accomplished by “acequias” community-operated watercourses with engineered canals that carry snow runoff or river water to distant fields. Each acequia was managed by its own “Mayordomo” and commission.  Most of the “engineering” was done by trial and error, experience, oral tradition, and more or less continuous manual labor with shovels and rakes.  One result of this system is that the older properties in the Santa Fe area are laid out long and narrow with access to the waters of the Santa Fe River at one end, and housing at the other.  Inconsequential today when the river is more of an occasional trickle than a rapidly flowing source of sustenance.

(This is the Santa Fe River - not an acequia.)

            

Our D-I-L and son live about one quarter mile from the SF River, but not on one of the funky old-time tracts.  (Their area was in fact a Japanese internment during WWII, but that’s a different history lesson.) She uses soaker hoses and generates a very productive harvest that last year included kale, sungold tomatoes, arugula, dill, hollyhocks and buffalo grass.

             

They sent, and we received and sowed a package of NM their hollyhock seeds this past autumn.  There is hope that these biennials will flourish in our plant-loving CT environment.  We have tried this before.  Some succeeded.   Others literally drowned in the overabundance of water – or succumbed to the dreaded Hollyhock “rust”.  This crop is intended to take over the space that was formerly allocated to our miniscule vegetable garden of six tomato plants.

             

But it’s only January – way too early to even think about gardening back here in “The Land of Steady Habits”.  Still, like gardeners in more fertile areas, our D-I-L is eagerly poring over her newly ordered seed catalogs out in the cold, arid “Land of Enchantment” – one of them from Baker Seed, owners of our own home town Comstock Ferre.

             

In his book “A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm”, author and farmer Stanley Crawford writes “To dream a garden and then to plant it is an act of independence and even defiance to the greater world.”

             

Overdramatic hyperbole to us sea level, drought-free, Northeastern plantsmen.  But spot on accurate for our high desert dwelling family and friends – and their predecessors.

Still Missing – But Getting Warmer

(Mars and I subscribe to "New Mexico" magazine. It's a little bit like our home state's "Connecticut" periodical but with turquoise and denim instead of pearls and polo shirts - and a regular feature called "One of Our Fifty is Missing." The column sardonically relates real-life stories wherein some non New Mexican behaves in a manner that indicates they have no idea of what or where "the Land of Enchantment" is, or even that it is a part of the United States of America.

       

Most of these situations involve a bureaucrat or service representative informing a New Mexican that their state is actually a foreign country and therefore special postage or a passport is required - or even worse that the thing they want to do just can't be done.    

      

 None of our friends or acquaintances seem to be afflicted with this shortcoming – they all seem to know where and what New Mexico is – but many of them don’t quite get what the weather is like when you get there.)

Still Missing – But Getting Warmer

       

Mars and I spent the winter holidays in Santa Fe, NM with our daughter-in-law and son (M and B) who live there.  When we returned home to Connecticut we were greeted by a pile of Christmas cards.  On one of them our good friends MJ and J had written, “Hoping you are enjoying your Christmas visit to warm New Mexico.”

      

 “Nooooooooo!  Not in the winter!” popped into our collective minds.

       

We’ve been traveling to northern New Mexico for almost twenty-five years now and hear things like that quite a lot – sometimes from people like MJ and J, who are in fact frequent travelers to Arizona and know exactly who its eastern neighbor is.  It seems that even those who are totally “not missing” New Mexico’s geographic location and/or national affiliation cannot help themselves from placing the Land of Enchantment in the wrong temperate zone.

       

In truth Mars and I have only seen that part of New Mexico from Albuquerque northward but we have heard that temperatures in the lower part of the state can be significantly warmer.  It is however worth mentioning that on the day I initially began this essay the temp in Carlsbad was a brisk nineteen degrees – while Santa Fe was a comparatively balmy twenty-four.  The average high for December is fifty-nine versus forty-three.

      

 (It actually took me several Internet sites to find out this info.  When I asked online for a “New Mexico temperature map” I was told  “Oh no! The page you are looking for does not exist. Go back, friend, go back!”  Evidently even the weather.com website is confused about where New Mexico is climatically.)

       

We travelled to Arizona once on an Elderhostel trip to the Grand Canyon and the Sonoran Desert.  And the major thing that we learned was that, especially in the western United States, altitude equals latitude – or as someone else put it in an Internet chat about weather conditions in NM, “elevation means everything out west.”.

       

That author went on to say that a good “rule of thumb” for altitude (even on the east coast) is 1,000 feet of altitude = 300 miles of latitude = 4 degrees F in temperature.  Santa Fe is forty miles north of Albuquerque and 2,000 feet higher.  So it is usually about 8.5 degrees cooler in the “City Different” than it is in the “Duke City”.   Our home town of Wethersfield, CT has an altitude of forty-five feet above sea level.  Santa Fe is about 7,000 feet at its lowest – more than enough to eliminate any temperate effects of Northern New Mexico's more southern latitude.

       

Mars and I first learned about winter weather in northern New Mexico when we renewed our wedding vows at half-time of a University of New Mexico  “Lady Lobo” basketball game with 11,000 of our closest friends on Valentine’s Day in 2004.  (It was a contest, which we and about twenty other couples won.)

       

We flew out for a long weekend and visited Ten Thousand Waves Spa in Santa Fe on the afternoon before the ceremony.  It was, to be generous, in the low twenties with a gale-force wind chill – or so it seemed – as we soaked outdoors in 100 degree plus waters with piles of snow on the ground around us while our hair and the wooden deck froze solid with each splash of liquid.  Albuquerque was probably eight and one-half degrees warmer – but we didn’t really care.

      

This year all four of us sat in the same hot tub as snow fell lightly on our heads and steam from the heated waters fogged our glasses.  On Christmas Day we all hiked in an arroyo at Museum Hill with our grand-greyhound Cheyenne.  The air was in the low thirties but the warm Zia sun allowed us to remove our gloves and hats, unzip our jackets, and unwrap our scarves.  In and around this we visited with “the kids” and their friends (some now ours also) – and enjoyed the heat (dumb-downed for New Englanders) of our daughter-in-law’s posole, and carnitas plus her non-Southwest comida such as cheese fondue, Italian Wedding soup, strada, and gingerbread cake.  

     

On our last day in New Mexico we met up with Mars’ BFF from high school who now lives in Albuquerque to hike along the Rio Grande Bosque, and dine on her tamales and black bean soup.  On our drive back from the river we pulled over to visit with a group of Sand Hill Cranes who, as they do every year, had fled to northern New Mexico from the Great White North for the winter season.

       

The morning after our travel day back home I went for a walk along the bicycle trail that begins across the street from out house.  The dial on our outdoor thermometer pointed to the same numbers that we experienced in Santa Fe – but the ambient New England air felt much cooler than that of the ten previous days.

       

New Mexico is way less humid than Connecticut.  So maybe it was because cold moist air actually does feel colder than dry air – something about moist air having a higher specific heat.

       

Or maybe – in spite of all the meteorology  – MJ and J, and the Cranes are actually right.  It is warmer in New Mexico – at least at Christmas.

Sources:

http://www.city-data.com/forum/albuquerque/291167-question-about-elevation-temps-2.html

http://www.scienceforums.net/topic/31664-why-does-wet-cold-air-feel-so-much-colder-than-dry-cold-air/