Greetings Dear Ones,

It’s that time of year when Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday follow me around like three bickering sisters arguing about what needs to get done first. Their voices are increasingly shrill.

“Sequencing is so important!” says Yesterday. “I keep telling you what happened when you do things in the wrong order!”

“I want everything done NOW,” says Tomorrow impatiently, pinching at Today’s elbow. “Yesterday was a total slacker. Listen to me, not her!”

“But I don’t know what to do first,” says Today. “There are far too many options. I cannot decide.”

We stroll through the house looking at all that needs to be cleaned up, washed, moved, cleared out, changed. We see the pile of work in the sewing room. I have brought some home from the shop so as to bookend my days with extra productivity.

Outside, we stroll through the grounds around the house, seeing pile after pile of wood assembled for projects. Some needs to be cut into firewood, some split and stacked, some made into things… I sigh and begin randomly weeding. This is not actually part of a plan, it just feels good to do Something. Anything.

The black flies are back. Vermonters everywhere are emerging joyfully into the long-awaited sunshine like woodland creatures in a Disney film—and immediately begin slapping themselves in the head. Their bites leave welts on the back of my neck the size of peanut M&Ms as I labor in the garden. (The black flies, that is, not the Vermonters.) I am doing silly things that I wish I had not started, like removing all the fencing and the rotting raised beds and designing new layouts from scratch. I have a recycled fence half up and I am rearranging the sheep fencing on the other side of the garden (they will share the fenceline) which is somewhere over a pipe that goes from the holding tank of the septic system out to the leach field, making things a little tricky for digging the necessary fence posts.

Again, I wander off. I am like a pinball bumping from task to task, not doing any of them, hearing the mutterings of Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday. Today knows that so much depends on her and yet she can’t think of what to do first. She can’t stick to anything because EVERYTHING is so important.

I travel down the hill and come across a little patch of trillium blooming in the carpet of leaves beneath a Maple tree. There are also Dutchman’s Breeches—looking like someone hung tiny pioneer underwear on a dollhouse clothesline—and several Jacks preaching in their pulpits nearby. This is an amazing discovery! I crouch in a tailor’s squat, marveling for moments. These can’t be in the same pen with the sheep! They will eat them. Trillium is especially delicious to deer, who destroy their fragile populations. Sheep will find them just as yummy. And Jack in the Pulpit is toxic, which no doubt, the sheep will find even more alluring.

“Our one ambition in life is to die,” nod the sheep.

“You will need to build more fences,” says Tomorrow. “This should be a little garden all to itself, right here. You need to keep out the sheep.”

“Just what we need!” says Today, vexed. “More work to do. Stop inventing work for me. YOU can do this—next season.”

“But I have no hands,” says Tomorrow. “Everything I will enjoy or despair over is the result of your hands, right now. You are the only one who can save these flowers.”

Prudence is calculating the costs, the square footage, she is thinking that we should just break down and rent a post hole digger for a day and go nuts, perforating the entire farm.

The day is warming up. It’s unseasonably hot and sticky, as if sugaring season left some extra maple syrup in the air, which is as debilitating for Today’s ambition as the bugs.

I get Gus & Otie out of their pen, tie them to the hitching post and begin their eye treatments. They have been so itchy lately, they have been scratching themselves on something (A bush? Brambles? A dead tree?) that poked them each in the right eye, resulting in painful corneal abrasions that require treatment. I put hot compresses on the swollen eyes, which they love. As soon as the warm cloth descends on the clenched furry eyelid guarding the blue haze on brown eye, the whole cow melts, as if all the tension he was holding against the pain drizzles out through his hooves. They take turns standing quietly, enjoying the attention and the soothing feel of the hot cloths. Then it’s time to get a dab of antibiotic ointment in under the eyelid—not as much fun! None of us relish that part. There are several thwarted attempts to bang me sideways with their horns. Afterwards, I brush and rake at their itchy places, which they enjoy to the point of slobbering grunts. Then I slather their faces and horns and inner ears with my homemade concoction of citronella oil, beeswax, and Vaseline. They smell amazing to me and horrible to biting flies trying to drink from the reflective pools of their weepy eyes. Our whole routine is alternating unpleasantness with pleasantness. They are patient patients.

“You could do the same with yourself,” says Tomorrow. “You might actually finish a task. Make a list of all the things you want me to enjoy one day and then alternate a horrible job with a pleasurable one.”

“Great idea!” says Yesterday. “Even a little investment in time is going to have compound interest in its value by the time Tomorrow arrives.”

“Tomorrow is never coming. It’s always ME, just ME, doing everything,” moans Today. “In the words of your eighty-three-year-old mother, ‘Why can’t we all just ride horses and eat chocolate?’”

Why indeed.

Today wanders back to look at the trillium in bloom.

In the shop, a beautiful bridesmaid is wearing a strapless dress in my favorite shade of green. She is heavily tattooed with native flowers, like those old botanical prints from the nineteenth century, such that she looks like a vase, with her narrow waist, and flowers coming out over her back, arms, and shoulders. The effect is quite pretty. I ask her about the tattoos. She knows everything about the native woodland flowers of Vermont. She is excited about my discovery of the trillium in my proposed pasture.

I tell her about my fencing ideas for protecting the trees at the edge of the pasture.
“Oh, I wouldn’t bother with anything permanent,” she says. “They are the Spring Ephemera. They are so fleeting. They are kind of like the daffodils in that they bloom and then reabsorb their energy. They try to set their seeds before the deciduous trees leaf out. (They know perfectly well that the forest canopy represents an oppressive management structure.) By summer, their foliage dies back completely. You won’t even know they are there. Put a bit of wire fencing around them until they are gone. It will be very soon.”

“So…these flowers are just for You,” I say to Today, thoughtfully. “We must see them as much as we can while they are here.”

“They will not be here tomorrow,” says Tomorrow with emphatic sarcasm. “Think of them as one who says ‘I’m just going to pop in for one drink’ and then disappears until next May. They are as transient as a ripe avocado. What? You had a doctor’s appointment? Sorry! You missed the entire bloodroot season. Try again next year!”

“To everything there is a Season, and a time for every purpose under heaven,” says Prudence piously, still thinking about the post hole digger.

When Spring Ephemerals are present, they take up the nutrients from rich and rocky soil that would otherwise be leached from melting snows making their way to the lowland waterways. They absorb calcium and other minerals. They are among the first to bloom and offer nourishing nectar to ants and other insects. They are the shy, botanical introverts who bloom when no one is around. As they complete their growing cycle, they send those nutrients back into the soil, when other plants are ready to take it up. They are part of a magical and complicated forest network of mycelium, messages, and bacteria behaving like that neighbor who ‘just wants to borrow a cup of sugar’ bringing gossip. Their small size and shallow roots enable them to take advantage of the top layer of soil as soon as it thaws, before the longer-rooted plants can compete.

They do quick work that leaves a benefit to all who bloom after them. But some of that “quick work” requires the hidden labor of many years. Trillium can take several years to produce a first fleeting flower. Same with Lady’s slippers. These are fragile and precious, even as they are patient and tenacious. I feel guilty looking directly at them, as if watching a Victorian lady on her fainting couch, recovering from ‘a spell,’ yet I have a strange, greedy delight in discovering the forest is healthy, the soil richly prosperous, as if I have discovered a rich uncle who has bequeathed me a considerable fortune.

Today, Tomorrow, and Yesterday are Nature’s gentle gardeners ensuring that the magic continues—little whispers of color on the forest floor in spring. I realize, as I gaze at these beauties, that I don’t have to be at war with these three sisters; they are doing their quiet work in my life already. I put my arms around them. “Let’s be friends,” I say. Father Time and Mother Nature are the boss of us all. Help me finish what I started yesterday and build the things I want for tomorrow.

I look around—this time, not at all the work to do but at what is really Happening:

Mud season is over. The prom dresses I labored over last week have already been sweated in, spilled on, shucked, and slung over chairs. Tree frogs sing in the night. The blue cohosh blooms fade in the woods, silent sentinels of withering ramps. The barn swallows are back and raising their first clutch of eggs. The fiddleheads are already fronds. Endings chase beginnings like bats and mosquitoes. Sometimes they are the same thing, as any Graduate knows. (Endings and beginnings, that is, not bats and mosquitoes. Anyone without a college education can tell that bats and mosquitoes are not the same things at all.) Like healing the scratches in our vision, some things are pleasant, some UN. The fabric of Life continues to be woven with tiny shots of color and light, ephemeral and perpetual.

Keep Mending, Dear Ones!!! Stitch by stitch… We each get to bloom in our season. (I might be that rare and mottled treasure that takes sixty years or more!) The Ephemerals are nature’s reminder that some beings peak in April and refuse to participate the rest of the year. Apparently, this is fine. We cannot bloom all the time! It may appear that we have the work ethic of Broadway actors and woodland flowers—eleven months underground to prepare for a three-week performance no one cheers. (Sometimes an audience of One is enough.) Sometimes, the work we do is unseen for years, while our time in the sun is unfairly brief because Big People with their Big Ideas show up to blot our sun. And yet…. And yet… Today, Tomorrow, Always… though the work of our blooming is tedious, it might just nourish an entire ecosystem we cannot see.

Do It.

If Today is not the day to bloom, your time is on its way. (Hopefully, black fly season will be over then.) All that is required is to do the one small thing that NOW requires so you will.

Speaking of which… I’d better get to it!

With sew much love,

Yours aye,

Nancy