Weeds & Seeds

Spring opens, most years, with a one-step-forward-two-steps-back dance. Cold rain and snow twirl around sunshine and warmth, as the odd summer-like day and maybe an unexpected frost cut in now and then. Through this spring cha-cha, the landscape greens up, the earliest flowers – both wild and cultivated – bloom, and the trees unfurl their leaves. As color seeps back into the world, gardening tasks lengthen my to-do list.

With a spattering of veggie beds and a perennial garden we revamped during last spring’s time of Staying Home, I’ve been fitting the gardening in between work hours and soccer games, woods wanderings and playing catch in the yard, dinnertime and bedtime. Much like spring, my gardening efforts come in fits and starts.

As soon as the growing things emerge, it seems the weeds quickly outpace whatever it is we’ve planted. Last week, my son and I plucked new weeds from the front garden and spread mulch around clumps of daylilies and irises, moonbeam coreopsis and barely out-of-the-ground astilbe stalks. We got about halfway through the job before running out of mulch, and the other half remains on hold until we have the time (and the truck) to collect more. Cha-cha-cha.

After considering what edibles to plant this season, waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for warmer weather, and sketching out what will go where, on Saturday I dropped the year’s first veggie seeds into one of the raised beds the kids helped my dad build last year. Into the freshly turned soil, I carefully sowed snow peas and beet seeds and spring greens. Still to come: green beans, carrots, squash, cucumbers, sungold tomatoes, maybe a row or two of potatoes, a few onions. It may take me the next month to get everything in, but it will happen. Eventually. Cha-cha-cha.

Last year, I grew two rows of zinnias between the snap peas and the bush beans in the big vegetable garden out back. This year, I think I may fill one of the smaller garden boxes in the side yard entirely with flowers – more zinnias and sunflowers and maybe some snapdragons. These, of course, we cannot eat. (Well, maybe the sunflower seeds, but we’ll likely leave those for the birds.) But they are nourishing in other, also important ways.

Through spring’s uncertain dance and into summer I’ll wait, hopeful, for the seeds to sprout, then for the stems to grow tall, and for the tightly furled buds to open. I don’t know what this dance is called – not a cha-cha or a waltz or a tango – but the choreography is pretty close to perfect.

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's May 13, 2021 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.

In Praise of Dandelions

When they were little, my children would pick dandelions by the armful. They’d load them onto the backs of their tricycles, weave them into gold-and-green crowns, and bring me bouquets – grasped in small hands and presented with proud grins. It didn’t matter much that those clutches of dandelions soon wilted, even when placed into cups of water – there were always more yellow blooms where they’d come from.

Some people hate dandelions to the point of waging (hapless) war against them. This is something I’ve never understood. Dandelions are hardy and sunny. They’re among the first blooms to pop up each spring, when nature’s palette is quite bland, and will propagate well into summer, after other (less resilient) blooms have arrived to fill the landscape with color. Whether it’s a single dandelion smiling upward along the front porch or an entire field of them reaching for the sun, they seem happy flowers.

Plus, when they’re done blooming, those sunny disks transform into wonderful, orbicular seed puffs. I don’t care how old you are, blowing into those puffs to watch them disperse seems irresistible. Unless, I suppose, you’re one of the people at war with dandelions.

For a few summers during my Colorado tenure, I worked mowing lawns for a friend’s company. Mostly, we took care of vacation homes – giant houses used for only a few weeks of the year and kept pristine for all the other weeks. There was one house, on “The Bench” overlooking town, whose owners rarely (if ever) visited during summer. But they insisted every dandelion hiding in their lawn be plucked or poisoned.

I couldn’t understand the painstaking search-and-destroy missions we conducted every week. The people were never there to SEE the dandelions. And the thing about dandelions in lawns is that when you mow the grass, the flowers get lopped off, and everything is just green; you wouldn’t know the dandelions were even there unless you really looked.

Of course, I don’t welcome dandelions in the garden and pull them up using the special dandelion-digging tool that reaches deep into the ground to – hopefully – extract the entire root, lest it re-sprout. But I leave the rest of them alone.

I don’t eat the dandelions – root, leaf, or flower – like some folks do. Nor do I use them medicinally or ferment the blossoms into wine. I just like how they look – bright, happy, undeterred by the mixed feelings they instill in humans.

Especially this year, when spring has been slow to settle in, and sunshine frustratingly fleeting, I’m glad to see the dandelions and their golden happiness spreading through the greening fields. If I close my eyes and turn my face toward the spring sunshine, I can picture my children, when they were very small, handing me bouquets of what some would disdainfully call weeds.

Those were some of the sweetest flowers I’ve ever received.  

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the May 24, 2019 issue of the Littleton Record.

Leaf Leaping

On one of those beautiful fall days we had in that lovely stretch from September into the first bright days of October, with sunshine streaming through colored leaves and temperatures warm enough for t-shirts, my youngest daughter grabbed a rake and started making a leaf pile. In her sixth autumn, she already knows one of the best fall activities is leaf leaping, and for that you need a good pile of leaves.

Any type of leaves will do, really, but the bigger the pile, the better the fun.

By the time her brother and sister came home from school, that first leaf pile of fall was of sufficient width and depth for jumping, which the children set gleefully to doing. A running start is paramount for the best landing. Run. Jump. Giggle. Sometimes they’d intersperse that sequence with a good roll through the leaves or a few minutes lying still in the pile, completely covered, silent until some unassuming being – the dog, a sister, Grandpa – happened by and the hidden child would jump out to starling effect.

I can’t figure out the allure of jumping into leaves. I did it when I was a kid, too – it’s a beloved fall tradition for kids growing up wherever there are trees to drop leaves to rake into piles. But as I watched my children for several successive afternoons jump joyfully into leaf piles – often with hard landings, always with plenty of crunch, and ending up with leaf particles mashed into hair and clothes – I couldn’t remember why, exactly, that activity is so much fun.

Whatever the appeal, my children remained jubilant in their leaf leaping. As the week went on, the trees dropped more leaves, and the kids and I kept on raking until the piles were nearly as tall as the children. Orange and yellow maple leaves joined the red ones that had started the pile. These were interspersed with smaller golden birch leaves and not-as-pretty, brownish apple leaves.

Each leap and landing released a colorful confetti of leaves swirling into the amber light of an autumn afternoon. Rake in hand, I’d fluff the pile after every jump, prepping for the next leaping turn. I even took a leap. Alas, while I strive to embrace my children’s wonder of life, I think I’m too far beyond the magic of childhood to get that leaf-leaping thrill now. In motherhood, at least for this activity, I’ve been relegated to spectator and pile fluffer.

One afternoon we invited a few friends (and their spectating, pile-fluffing moms) to join in the leaf-leaping fun. By now, we had four huge piles of various autumnal hues. The children – nine of them, ranging in age from 2 years to 8 – gravitated to the largest pile, a colossal heap of orange maple leaves and yellow birch. Some of the kids jumped right in. A couple surveyed the scene first, mentally weighing the possibility of a hard landing against the potential for pure fun.

In the end, fun reigned.

Not content with mere jumping, the kids threw leaves by kaleidoscopic armfuls into the air and laughed as the wind carried them into friends, siblings, moms. Little feet kicked big steps joyfully through the crunchy piles. Occasionally, someone would lie back for a moment, looking up through the leaves still hanging from branches overhead to clouds skittering in white puffs across a blue sky.

After an hour or two of kicking, tossing, and jumping, the biggest pile had been diminished in heft by at least half, the leaves now thoroughly mulched and loftless. The children moved on to the other piles, happily scattering leaves hither and yon.

The next day, our calm and sunny fall changed, as Autumn found its bluster. The wind knocked down the remaining maple and birch leaves. Rain soaked the shrunken piles, which would soon be picked up and hauled away to the compost. Prime leaf-leaping season, at least in our yard, blew away on a gust of wind, leaving the song of children’s laughter in its wake, and a few leaves still dancing on the breeze. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the October 10, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Almost one of those days

Today was very nearly a bad day. I woke early, after a relatively sleepless night, and wondered how the heck I was going to make it through – especially with three tired kids home on school vacation and not a plan penciled into the calendar. (The littlest one has developed an intense fear of spiders and lady bugs, and since our old house is the site of many springtime hatches of the latter, she often simply refuses to go to – or stay – asleep.) The forecast called for sunny skies, but the morning was dull and gray, matching the fogginess inside my head.

Biker girls

And then, not long after breakfast, the clouds were suddenly gone, the sky clear and blue. We tumbled out the door around 9 o’clock this morning, and we didn’t come in until 3, and then just for a short breather. Within minutes of exiting the house into the mid-morning sunshine, we had shed our sweatshirts for short sleeves, welcoming the warmth on our winter-white skin.

We raked the thatch from the lawn in front of the flower bed, weeded said bed and cleaned out the winter litter, and started turning the dirt in the vegetable garden to prepare it for the seeds we’ll drop there as soon as the sun has adequately warmed the dark earth. I pounded stakes for the pea trellis into the soft ground and returned to the front yard to find the kids in an impromptu t-ball game. That littlest one might be afraid of ladybugs, but not of much else, and she has a wicked swing of the bat.

The kids have been begging to eat outside, a request I denied just yesterday when the temperature was chilly enough for hats and mittens. But today it seemed shameful to be in if we could be out, so we lunched al fresco. Partway through our leftover pizza, we heard a familiar bird call that told us the hawk (broad-winged, I think) from last year was back. About an hour later I saw her flit past the still-bare apple trees toward the woods and the nest from last year, built high in an old white birch tree along the woods road.

We went for a walk to visit the grandparents around the corner. My son mastered riding his bike sans training wheels, striving to keep up with his twin sister, who has been pedaling free for weeks now. The “big girl bike” for the littlest one arrived at our doorstep, was assembled with only moderate consternation, and now she’s in the biking mix, too. We ate dinner on the porch, with background music provided by the peepers in the pond across the road, then rode bikes around the driveway some more.

Yep, today could have been tough. Instead, thankfully, it was beautiful in so many ways. It’s a gamble, during April vacation, to stick around northern New England. It could be snowing. It could be 70 degrees and sunny. It could be 40 and raining. Many of my children’s classmates and their families have fled for the week to safely sunny Florida, or at least as far south as New York City.

But today, the gamble paid off. The sun came out. The coffee kicked in. The kids played hard, and they are wiped. I hope they sleep tonight.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings from a full life.

Cleaving to Sunshine

Amid the blaring colors of autumn, summer has returned fleetingly to northern New England this week. Last week we dug out the wool socks and fleece pullovers, uncovered the mittens and ski hats, and huddled by the fireplace as frost painted the lawn and fields in an overnight cover of cold white. But then heat returned, and with it flip-flops and tee-shirts and skin bared to the light.

We call this Indian Summer, and I’ve never been sure why. Who has time to wonder, as the dark of evening creeps closer to midday? We push ourselves outside, faces turned toward the sun, knowing all too well what comes next.

Don’t get me wrong, I love winter. Always have. Anyone who has chosen to make her home in northern New England is wise to embrace winter and its stark, white beauty. We can ski here – if we’re lucky – during at least six months of the year. But loving winter does nothing, for me anyway, to lessen the joys of these warm, bright days in October.

This is the season of country fairs, when we celebrate the beauty of fall and the bounty of the summer just gone by. We postpone putting in the storm doors, hoping for a few more days of the house flung open to outside warmth. We dodge the steady stream of leaf-peepers choking the roads and trails and return to more secret places for the season. We cover the tomatoes when frost threatens, hoping for one more harvest, and we put up a bit of the summer produce to enjoy in the darkness of winter. We stack firewood, rake leaves, cut back the flower gardens.

Even as we cleave to the sunshine, we know the icy winds and long nights of winter are coming.

As a final act of faith that summer will return to some distant time, we dig into the still-warm earth and plant bulbs, thinking beyond the depths of winter snow to the first blooms of spring, when color will return in the gentle purple of crocuses, the happy yellow of daffodils, the warm red of tulips.