Rite of Spring
By Jeff Hampton
Ben stepped out the front door and stood still for a moment, letting the afternoon sun bathe his face. It was almost Valentine’s Day, and after two brutal weeks of freezing weather that included a heavy “dusting” of snow, the clouds had finally parted and the temperature was back to a normal level for North Texas. He had been waiting all week for the opportunity to push aside some of the gloom and death of winter and begin setting the stage for the return of life to his little world.
As he walked around to the backyard, his mind strolled back through the years to his previous home where he had lived for 20 years – 18 with Brenda and then two by himself when he seemed to be cloaked in a constant winter that would not end until he found the springtime again in someone new.
Walking to the back of the lot, he thought for a moment that there was still a mound of snow until he remembered that they had covered the camellias in a thermal blanket as a protection from the cold.
He and Brenda had a camellia bush at the old house, but it had been planted years before they arrived and it never needed covering. Through heat of summer and cold of winter, it stood strong and hearty beside the front door. It had even withstood the indignity of a foundation crew that had to tie its bulk down toward the ground so they could dig beneath its roots to get to a pier that needed raising. He recalled how strange it looked to see a grown man crawl into a cavity below the camellia to place concrete blocks. When the work was done, the hole was filled and the camellia was unbound. That next winter it turned out hundreds of bright red blooms.
The camellias hiding from him now had been planted just before the freeze and were far too young and tender to leave out in the cold. Bending over now to move the flower pots that were holding down the blanket, he thought back to those days at the old place and tried to recall if there had been a routine each year that announced the coming of spring. Perhaps it was when he would go out and crank up the mower for the first time in months, not to mow any grass but to mulch the last of the dry brown pecan leaves from their own trees, and the crinkly remains of the red oak trees from across the street that piled up around the front steps.
That wasn’t needed on this lot where he and Cathy had built their new home two years earlier. While there was a good row of scrubby pecans and hackberries along the back property line, they didn’t drop many leaves and most of those just landed in heaps in the mud around the tree trunks where they would decay over time and add to the stockpiles of mulch. And in the front, the two live oaks they planted the week they moved in didn’t contribute anything in the wintertime.
Carefully lifting the thermal blanket off the camellias, he was pleased to see that the leaves were still green and plump with moisture, and the buds still waiting to bloom were bright green and not burned brown by the cold. The camellia at the old place was a winter bloomer like these but sometimes it would start late and show off all the way to Easter when it came early on the calendar. Folding the blanket and carrying it back to the garage, he knew that these camellias wouldn’t need the same attention next year, so uncovering them would not become a rite of spring.
And then he walked to the front porch to liberate the Boston ferns that had been huddled under old bed sheets in the corners of the porch. When he and Cathy designed the house almost three years earlier, they made sure they had a long, deep porch that could be a place of shelter when the weather was bad and enjoyment on the much-too- few days when a warm afternoon sun and cool breeze created the perfect conditions for sitting in the porch swing. That first summer they hung ferns between the porch columns but failed to give them enough attention and they got beat up by the extreme heat and then winter came and finished them off. They hung new ferns the next spring, but one of the replacements was overtaken by a pair of doves that nested two hatchlings among the fronds. That fern had to be replaced too, and he wondered if the doves would come back this year and which fern they might choose. Perhaps that would be the nod to spring that he was looking for.
Pulling the sheet off the ferns, some were still very green while some were brown and dry. He picked one of them up by the hanger and shook it, sending a storm of dead leaves cascading to the ground, only to be swept up by a gust of wind and blown back into his face. He sputtered and spit and dropped the basket as he wiped the leaves from his face. He heard a giggle and looked up in time to see a clutch of students walking home from the high school and he suddenly felt old. It had been decades since he had stood around outside the high school door on a day such as this, waiting to see if Lisa would come out and if she would be alone and if he might have the courage to step up and walk home beside her. Those Februaries were fresh and flush with the anticipation of spring and all the mysteries about the ways of girls that swirled in the mind of a 16-year-old boy.
And then for a moment it was a February morning in college when he and Brenda first met and discovered that they had two classes together. They walked together congenially but tentatively at first, but over the weeks those walks became a conversation that lasted almost 30 years until that last February when the hope of remission and more days of sunshine turned to fear. And wasn’t it a sunny February day like this when a home health nurse had stood with him on the porch and told him he needed to prepare for the worst?
A shiver shot up his back and for a moment he thought it might be a return of a winter cold front, but it was just the memories and he shook his head hard as he often did to scatter the thoughts that still haunted him sometimes. Returning to his work, he picked up the fern, shook it well and then climbed up the step stool to hang it. And then he stretched out the thin black irrigation tube that had been curled up against the ceiling and poked it down into the fronds. Tonight he would turn on the sprinkler system and give the ferns and the entire yard a good watering.
The sprinkler system at the old place was an ancient beast with mechanical gears and timers that had long frozen with rust so he’d taken to watering everything by hand and with a sprinkler at the end of a hose. The yard there was more established and wild than this one and it didn’t seem to require as much fuss or maintenance. But on a good day – like this one – he liked to go out and poke around and see what was happening. In his mind he tried to visualize how this new yard would look in another 10 years – what kind of nooks and crannies it would have that would become familiar and inviting. Like that odd little notch by the bedroom at the old place where it was too shady for grass and where the wild roses would grow on the chain link fence and sometimes a violet or iris might decide to bloom for the first time in years.
And it was probably on a day like this one when he would clean up the fountain in the small back yard, digging out the leaves and the sludge and then filling the lower basin with water and turning on the pump. He always enjoyed flipping the switch that first time and watching as the water bubbled out of the top and filled one tier and then another and another until the back porch gurgled with the sound of living water. But one of those last years, in his loneliness he forgot about it until the water evaporated and the pump seized up. He never turned it on again, and the night before he moved out he pushed the heavy concrete basin on its side and rolled it across the property line for the neighbor to enjoy, closing once and for all the quaint Italian garden that once was a place of life.
The new house had no water features, at least not yet, but it had so much promise. Cathy loved to grow vegetables, which is something that was new to him. He was a little unsure at first, but when the sod was first put in they had staked out a large area to leave bare for a garden, and he had gotten caught up in the excitement when the tiny farm started producing cucumbers, tomatoes and carrots, and attracting rabbits that had to be held back with chicken wire. But the garden was in the full sun and so this year they decided to give the land over to roses and other sun lovers and try planting the long, narrow side yard with vegetables where they’d get some afternoon shade. A couple of weeks earlier a dump truck dropped a load of garden mix in the alley and they spent the better part of two days wheeling it to the new garden plot and the other beds. And then they piled up the rest and shaped it into a berm and that’s where they planted the camellias.
Looking at the garden, still barren with winter, he decided to drive down the street to the feed store to see if there was something he could buy Cathy as a start for this year’s farming. On the wooden porch out front they had set out some flats of herbs and lettuce and collards and leafy vegetables that didn’t interest him. Inside, he asked if they had any tomatoes yet, but they said it was too early and of course it was. He walked out back to look around and found some flats of strawberries. They had tried those the past summer but they burned up and he wasn’t convinced that they should try that again. He was starting to leave when he saw the seed rack near the front door, and that sparked his interest.
The potential of another freeze – or several over the next month – made live plants a little risky. But seeds – seeds were a promise of things to come. Their little paper packets could be held and read and even shaken, with the little rattle from inside generating visions of rows of cucumbers, squash, beans and cantaloupe, and big bushy clumps of parsley, sage and thyme. And who could resist the pictures on the front of the Morning Glories and their promise of blue, pink and white blooms crawling up and down the trellises and even up into the trees and beyond.
Yes, seeds – seeds on Valentine’s Day. From this year on, that would be his rite of spring.
THE END
Copyright © 2014 by Jeff Hampton