Vernalization

 

The turn of the season

It has been awhile since I felt the natural breeze of The Greening. Cold has returned to Wisconsin . Not yet the stinging cold of January or the enduring cold of March, but cold nights and cold winds nonetheless – nights that reckon the coming chill and winds that tug the last paled leaves away from their branches, sending them down to the ground and often far away.

But after all, it is Wisconsin , and cold happens. The temperature is not the problem, though. It’s not the warming of spring I miss when I miss The Greening. (In truth, I don’t resent the Wisconsin cold. I respect it, actually, as the one thing that probably keeps this land of lakes and hills from being over-populated, saving it from falling victim to its own beauty. The cold scares a lot of folks off, and I suppose I should confess that this is fine by me.) No, what I have lost for some time, I am almost ashamed to admit, is the joy. The Greening to me was always about joy. The joy of the simple, the joy of the natural.

I read back over the stories of The Greening today. Just now, in fact, right before I sat down to write this final chapter. I read, revisiting each chapter for the first time since it was written. As I read, I recalled the ease and fun of telling those early stories. It started almost six months ago to the day, and it never was in the slightest bit a chore for me. I never grew bored of the cats in the garage, the bird chases in the air, or the colors that arrived in wildflower waves along the roads and in the meadows. In the heat and drought of midsummer, I still enjoyed the waters cooled by the night. When August brought all-time records for rainfall and flooding in my county, I marveled at how the deluge bloated the greenness of the trees and the level of the lakes. Everything seemed to be grand and getting grander. How easy it was to spot the stories left in the wake of each furry critter and every raucous storm! And the foster cats, well they were my spring parable, a reminder of the ever presence of newness and growth and change and joy and awe.

That season of joy turned, not on a dime or overnight, but over weeks and months, to something else. To numbness. Numbness clothed in a soiled drapery of excuses such as too much work, too many deadlines, hectic travel, too little outdoor adventure, not enough sleep, and a social life that I had pruned down so much that it had gone and withered on the vine. The season of joy turned, like a rotting pumpkin, to a season of melancholy.

And I didn’t even see it coming.

 

The parable of the wildflower seed

Delivered to my door just about a week back was a box of wildflower seeds. You see, I’m replanting half my front yard with a wildflower prairie, and so naturally I had to shop around for wildflower seeds. Not really having a clue what I was doing, I ordered different mixtures of colors and heights, with varying sun requirements and blooming schedules. Too many seeds are better than too few, I guessed. Plant what you can and see what grows, so the good book says. (Plus, it gave me an excuse to buy a really cool roto-tiller.)

You wouldn’t believe the smallness and variety of these seeds, especially compared to the plants they each could become some day. The Black-Eyed Susan seed looks like a tiny broken splinter, barely big enough to notice even if it was stuck in your teeth, yet it will grow several feet high with that comforting face and sunny halo. The Purple Coneflower seed is drab and clumsy, a boring beige, yet this robust little thing grows easily to produce a flower of deep reddish purple with an orange center. (Imagine that, all that color from seed and dirt and water and air.) There’s a rock hard little black ball of a seed that grows to produce large pink flowers called Nodding Pink Onions. The Prairie Cinquefoil seed is almost too small to even see with the naked eye, yet it becomes a 3 foot wildflower that blooms June through September. The olive green Lupine seed looks like it might be good only for making miniature split pea soup, which would be real waste compared to the dense explosions of blue-violet they can produce if you just drop them in the ground.

Nobody would ever accuse me of having expertise in wildflowers or horticulture. In fact, so far my experience doesn’t go much further than clearing a few thousand square feet of grass with Roundup and typing in a credit card number to order some wildflower seeds on the web. And yet here I am, with this small box full of plastic bags labeled with a few dozen genus and species I can’t even pronounce. Enough to fill a prairie five times what I’ve cleared, mind you.

As I browse through the box, I greatly enjoy reading the common names of the flowers. It reminded me of the fun of naming Mamasita’s foster kittens some five or six months ago when they were but little seeds themselves. Some lucky folks, somewhere a long time ago, got to name a few kajillion species of wildflowers. Some of these names sit right here in my little shoebox size vessel of potential. I’ll call out a few by name: Shasta Daisy, Baby’s Breath, Chinese Forget-Me-Not, Foxglove, Toadflax, Johnny Jump-Up, Mexican Red Hat, Dense Blazingstar, Bishop’s Cap, Jack in the Pulpit, Bradbury’s Bee Balm, Jacob’s Ladder, Missouri Primrose, Golden Tuft, Catchfly, Spiderwort, Wild Bergamot, Canada Milk Vetch, and one that really tickles me – the Hoary Vervain. (These names make me want to write an irreverent screenplay with each character named after a wildflower. Plot: Jack in the Pulpit has a torrid affair with Hoary Vervain, but he forgets his Bishop’s Cap, resulting in the conception and birth of the bastard child Toadflax who runs away from home at age 11 to apprentice with the eccentric chemist, the Wild Bergamot, at the castle Foxglove where together they invent the cure for shingles which they market and sell as Bradbury’s Bee Balm. I’d love to have worked Spiderwort into the plot, but the sentence was already far too long.)

But aside from all the fun of reading the names of wildflowers, I did actually have to research how to plant them. And it was here that I found the parable for my bout of melancholy…

Strangely, one must plant the wildflower seeds in the early winter, after the first frost. I thought this interesting, so I read up on it. Well, apparently many wildflowers (and other woodland plants and flowers) require a process called “vernalization”. Wikipedia defines vernalization as: “ The acquisition of the competence to flower in the spring by exposure to the prolonged cold of winter.” The American Heritage Science Dictionary defines vernalization: “The subjection of seeds or seedlings to low temperature in order to hasten plant development and flowering. Vernalization is commonly used for crop plants such as winter rye and is possible because the seeds and buds of many plants require cold in order to break dormancy.”

In other words, some seeds won’t bud in the spring unless they freeze in the winter!

Even in my funk, I saw this lesson clear as day. Could it be that I am such a seed that requires vernalization? Melancholy is the emotional winter season, one might say. And the vernalization of the human soul might well require periods of melancholy to “break dormancy” or, in truth, to be reborn.

Melancholy may not be something to shove away or deny. Maybe melancholy has its own place in The Greening. Our emotional winters are what allow the renewal of our spirits, so that we may again (and again) burst with the big fat buds of our emotional springtimes.

At this moment I have friends also weathering bouts of their own. One suffers neuropathy that affects his getting around on foot as usual. Another is dealing with the learning of an unfaithful spouse and having the floor of her life fall out from under her. Another has lost a sister in a car accident and a cousin to an IED in Iraq. Another broke down and cried with no warning in the middle of the gymnasium. We all face emotional winters, and sometimes more than a few in a lifetime. May we all remember the parable of the wildflower seed when these seasons come around.

 

The wildflowers of 2007

My literal wildflowers for 2008 will be planted soon in this winter of 2007 to allow for proper vernalization. But these stories of The Greening started this year with five wildflowers of a different kind – fuzzy, fragile wildflowers, four of them just a day old and the other a new mama nursing them to life. It’s rightful to close these stories where they all began, with Mamasita and her chilluns.

You might remember that Little Dirty was the first to be adopted, starting his new life as Dusty in a loving family with giggling little girls. After that, Panda was adopted by one of my best friends and became Sweet Kitty to the Brame family. Then, the storied tabby called The Fading Tiger found his way into the heart and home of my dear friend Claire, where he now roams as the beloved Milo . Left behind in the storytelling were three: Aldo, Mamasita, and the 2 nd foster mother whose litter passed on early and are buried under six stones in my side woods.

Mamasita and Aldo had to go back to the Humane Society when I took in the 2 nd litter to my garage. There, they got fixed and put in cages up front where there was room. I visited almost every day, but after a week they were not yet adopted. Aldo was getting a bad cold, and Mamasita was getting crabby. This was back in late July. The 2 nd foster litter had just sadly passed. I had room again, so without much contemplation, I went back and got Aldo and Mamasita. There was no other option I could bear. How could I stand to bury six little kittens in my side woods and then leave the healthy ones I raised earlier in a strange place with an uncertain future? There I was, again with an adoption challenge on my hands – 3 foster cats in the garage with already a house full of my own pets.

 

Mamasita

An interesting trait of Mamasita was that once her kittens were big enough to get about on their own, she began to become more independent. Specifically, she would sit constantly perched inside the garage window. It was obvious she pined for the outdoors. She watched every squirrel, noticed every hawk, heard every thunderstorm, and smelled every coyote that passed by. And she loved it.

I saw a window of providence. A couple months earlier, you might remember, I had met Cecilia at her cat sanctuary near Mazomanie, where a huge, fenced, outdoor sanctuary gave home to some very happy cats. I agreed to adopt Mamasita but then “sponsor” her life at the cat sanctuary. There she now lives, free to walk safely amongst those sights, touches, sounds, and smells that she always longed for.

I visited Mamasita not long ago. Her health was great, her coat was royal, and her eyes clear. I held her again for a few minutes. I rubbed her cheeks with my chin, and she was happy. Then I let her down and she trotted off to a rock wall under a tree, where she was yet happier.

 

Aldo and Lil Mama

That left the 2 nd mother and the kitten Aldo in my garage. The mother was the tiniest of cats – healthy but tiny – weighing in at about 4 or 5 pounds full grown. I started calling her the obvious – “Lil Mama”. At the time, Lil Mama was still quite confused. She had gone from life of a stray to being a pregnant stray, to bearing a litter in the Humane Society, to living in a strange garage, and finally to losing her entire litter to the fading kitten syndrome.

Despite all that, Lil Mama was one of the most affectionate cats I’d ever seen, with people and with other animals, so when the kitten Aldo came into her life back in the garage, she loved it. She got another chance at motherhood. Lil Mama really took to Aldo - she followed him around, cleaned him constantly, warmed him, and for a couple weeks even occasionally nursed him. Aldo had no problems with the attention. It’s as if he knew she needed to love like a mama loves, and he was happy to oblige her.

Meanwhile, the little Aldo started to grow up before my eyes. He had always been the precocious and pensive kitten from about the first week, a very special little one. Yet he was the only kitten not chosen for adoption. I pondered this. He was such a different little kitten. He observed constantly, following me from room to room and then sitting quietly with his head cocked to the side and eyes bright, studying. I was dumbfounded how each potential adopter passed on Aldo, while I myself grew more and more attached to him.

Or then again, perhaps everybody passed on Aldo because somehow, in some way, he had already been chosen. He had tamed and been tamed, and was already unique in all the world.

And so it came to be that Aldo would stay with me, along with the Lil Mama. As I write this, Aldo sleeps right beside me, peacefully nested in that box full of wildflower seeds.

 

Epilogue: Peace, like a river

Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say, “It is well, it is well, with my soul.”

(Horatio G. Spafford, 1873)

The Wisconsin River flows near me, across a small road and down a steep hill south of my house. When the leaves fall off the trees, you can see a fair bit of the water from my living room. And on very quiet nights, you can hear the river waves lap up against the rocky shoreline. Between that river and me is mostly woods, and I spent half the weekend at the edge of those woods starting the construction of an outdoor, cat-proof fence. Animals (just like me) need to be able to go outside whenever they want. Soon they’ll get that privilege, and I can’t wait to watch them all with that fresh air freedom. I suppose they’ll all run around excited like little ones again. And I hope, in seeing this, that I will too.

And so flows The Greening, like a river, through birth and springtime and childhood and loss and grace and work and melancholy and winter and wildflowers and hope.

But always and forever, towards Peace.

-bn

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