I once came across the results from a competition for The Best Job in the World. The runner-up was the person who built rockets and castles out of lego for store displays; the winner was the guy who drove up and down the state of Vermont all autumn long, tracking peak color.

But what about whoever thinks up names of plants for seed catalogs? Oh Happy Day tomatoes, Dragon Roll peppers, Magic Molly potatoes – inspirational; Jack Be Little pumpkins, Pesto Party basil, Black Cat petunias, Bees Knees monarda (it’s short) – informative. The possibilities are dazzling.

And I am dazzled. It’s hard to keep the size of my fenced garden in mind as these voluptuous images, promising desirable traits, flow out of my mailbox. I sit by my window with a cup of tea, my cat, the catalogs, and post-it notes to mark all the pages that have stuff I want. It’s only when the catalogs bristle to bursting with neon colored post-its that I will sit down and get real, pull half the markers out, and order.

No doubt producing the new hybrid comes first, but how about getting a name first, and breeding a product to match? Crowd My Roots tomatoes. Squeeze In eggplant. Vertical pumpkin vines. Works With Asparagus Cosmos. I would splurge on extra post-its for those.

Meanwhile, here’s my January gardening: the windowsill.

narcissus, jasmine, heliotrope, and amaryllis

For my far-flung family Christmas means the mailing of many packages. Some of the cartons have been used for years, have crossed the country many times, and have so many pairs of crossed-out addresses on them I can only congratulate the mailman for figuring out where they were going, versus where they were coming from. Maybe we should have left the addresses alone and just pasted on big arrows for every change of direction.

Some of the boxes have been disassembled, turned inside out, and taped back together for a set of fresh downs. Forgive me for that, I’ve acclimatized to Ann Arbor.

As each box appears, I approach with my very careful utility knife. Bubble wrap and packing paper explode across the room, revealing a stash of wrapped gifts wearing tags and ribbons I have seen before.

Finally room under the tree for the cat

On Christmas morning we find the new gifts inside are nestled into old familiar tissue paper, creases running through angels, trees, and peppermint stripes. Well-traveled shirt boxes limp a little at the corners, supported by bits of tape. I roll up the ribbons, collect the tags, smooth out the tissue, fold the boxes flat, and pick over the wrapping paper for usable centers and bits to save. The gifts will stay here, but the materials of their transport have eleven months of rest ahead of them, and will be on their way again.

Something old, something new, and one perpetually changing into the other. As Christmas turns into the New Year I make more room on shelves and tables, drawers and closets, and the new things settle in and become familiar.

Happy New Year!

My chapbook of poems, The Museum of Fresh Starts, is being published by Finishing Line Press. The book is 18 poems connected by a theme of migration, change, and the need for refuge. It will be published on March 29 but you can pre-order it here to help determine the press run.

It isn’t the direction seasonal wonder usually goes in, but it’s quite miraculous to me to walk out into the yard as winter sets in, and feel how everything has changed. A few weeks ago I was barefoot on soft ground, and now I’m in clogs and woolly socks. Air has changed, earth has changed, water has changed – all that was soft is hard. Christina Rosetti was delightfully apt noting that in winter water is like a stone; but it doesn’t seem bleak to me. It seems full of sparkle and strangeness, that just the tilt of the earth’s axis is enough to turn summer into winter.

Imagine our farthest ancestors out of Africa tripping on that rock of winter for the first time. Water like a stone – what sorcery was this? Had the sun, now so low on the horizon, changed its mind about us and gone looking for a better set of creatures to support? Even in the time of the ancient Greeks, Herodotus wrote that the Scythians believed no one could travel in the northern parts of the

Snow Scrim

continent because the air was full of feathers. He knew it to be snow, but the story reflects the astonishment of a first encounter.

We have only a scrim of snow on the ground as yet and early predictions are for a mild, dry winter; but that depends on an El Niño developing in California. A wet west coast makes a dry midwest. We are assured there’s science behind this, but it sounds like action at a distance, which is to say magic. There’s science behind winter turning water to stone, too. Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it can’t seem magical.

They say there’s a “ten minute rule” in southeastern Michigan: if you don’t like the weather, wait ten minutes. It’s an exaggeration, but only somewhat. We have weather that slides up the Ohio river valley and weather that slides down from Canada, and they seem to have a lot of fun with each other. I left town for a few days with the yard looking like this,

and returned to find it looking like this.

Those are not black and white photos; that’s what it has today for “color.” It seems all the more amazing to me because I spent the previous forty years in Southern California, where there is only one weather forecast for May through November. I can recite it by heart, but will spare you. December through April aren’t much different.

My immediate task is to get out the rake and knock the wet, heavy snow off the branches of various shrubs before they break under its weight. This is fun – organizing my own mini-blizzards. I could grab the ends of the branches and shake them, but the rake keeps me far enough back that the snow doesn’t land on me.

The ground’s not frozen yet, but I’m still glad I got the bulbs planted before I left. The air is cold. A thin coating of ice gathers on the handles of my tools, and when I pick them up it melts coldly onto my gloves. But next week it could be (relatively) warm again.

I’ll let you know.

It takes a lot of walking in autumn leaves, planting bulbs, and puttering in the garden to get some peace these days amid the slogans and shouting. Nature, at least, is ready for change: leaves turn bright and fall away, juvie eagles are gone to fish in open water somewhere else. We’ve had a rainy October and the colors were late in coming, but here they are, lighting up trees before drifting down to mulch the winter ground, the end of one growing season and preparation for another.

Yard and garden give us concrete things to do to bring success, and I am grateful to them for that clarity: observe their needs, nurture them, and be rewarded with fruit and flowers, usefulness and beauty, which seem otherwise to be in short supply.

I have planted a hundred more bulbs in front of the house, and a few shrubs in the edges of the woods; I have a few more still to plant. I want glory to come bursting out of the dirt come April, making neighborhood dog-walkers stop and look up from the echo chambers of their smartphones, at least for a moment. I won’t collect their data and sell it to advertizers while they’re looking at my daffodils.

For something with such a material result, gardening is mysteriously satisfying to the spirit. Tomatoes can be beautiful, but I grow them to eat. I grow them for a material benefit to my physical body. But I buy most of the food I eat and could easily buy all of it; why do I garden? The transformation of dirt, water, seed, and sunlight into a substance nourishing to cell and sinew, supplying the gardener with the power to move, think, and write blog posts, is the most ordinary fact of existence on earth; still, the ripe tomato in my hand seems miraculous.

Gardens have been connecting people to the cosmos like this for as far back as we have stories about it. Time, our oldest literature tells us, began in a garden, and the garden was where we learned to tell good from evil. I’m still doing that in mine, sorting the processes that help my plants from those that hurt them. They aren’t always obvious, and it’s done mostly by trial and error. The triumphs of understanding, when they come, feel like sudden little windows opening into the great wide secrets that the whole universe has always known.

I went out to the garden to gather the green tomatoes, because a frost was predicted overnight. Ripening is what tomatoes do, and they will continue to do it indoors, slowly, without leaf or vine. It is in them to do it; they participate directly in that large universal scheme. The vines spent the night open to the cold sky and this morning they are withered, the blackened leaves of tomato plants sifted over by red leaves falling from the nearby maples. I stand in this wide sweep of time, lifted into the flow of seasons, and for the moment not even needing to make plans.

This is what some of that ambition led to. We ran out of New York Times and had to use packing paper, brown paper grocery bags, and random pieces of cardboard for the base. Many barrowloads of mulch later we had a lovely winding path with places to stop and look, or sketch, or sit. My idea was to mark out areas where certain plants could be encouraged or yanked out – confining (good luck) raspberry brambles here; spreading a fern bed (more likely) there. It also made it possible to visit the redbud and the kousa dogwood we’d planted back deep. If I can find more shrubby perennials this late I will plant them in the bends of the path, but it may have to wait for spring.

The woods are thinning out a little with autumn, but it seems to be way behind again this year. The only red in my yard is on the slowly flourishing late tomatoes. Maybe this is the new normal.

We put a white wrap around selected tree trunks to keep the deer from stripping the bark any more than they already have. I still wish, if they’re going to ruin my trees, they’d have the courtesy to shed their antlers where I could find them. With all the deer traffic in my yard, you’d think at least I could have some souvenirs.

The garden right now is Easy Street. Weeds and bugs have slowed down with the cooler nights and shorter days, while the tomatoes keep rolling in like it’s still mid-August. Mostly all I have to do is go out there with a gathering basket and let the gorgeous ripe delectable tomatoes fall into my open hands.

So of course I become ambitious. Shall I clean out the raspberry brambles taking over the little clearing in the woods where I like to sit and write? How about transplanting some of those ferns to the bare spot on the other side of the yard? Or starting a new crop of cilantro? Or readying the cold frame for a some cool-weather greens? Or mulching the heck out of places where I might want to plant more bulbs?

I did about half of those. The mulching was facilitated by Doug, who carted mulch by the

caryopteris

barrowfull. I’m using it to turn a weedpatch into a civilized bed of caryopteris and nepeta, two shrubby perennials that bloom blue in late summer. Doug also facilitated my tea break when, ambition satisfied, I plunked down into one of the new adirondack chairs he made. Tomorrow will be another Sunday, with another New York Times, and then more paper to mulch with. Perfect.

herb garden in august

There are many positive interactions between a newspaper and a garden. Stressful current events come at you more slowly when you read them on paper in natural daylight, while the peace and calm of the garden provide another focus when you need to stop and regain composure, so often the case these days. Raise your eyes from the paper, look out across the garden, admire your handiwork, and muse on what to do next. The garden is a place you can always do something about.

Sunday is the best day for this, actual news being confined to one section. Among the other sections you can read about gardens to visit, find reviews of gardening books, see photos of garden parties in rich people’s back yards, and maybe find a few ads for useful things to wear or use while gardening. Apart from all that, you can read the Sunday Times for the quality of the writing. Felicitous phrases abound. How can you not love reading that morning people are “firing up coffeepots at an hour usually reserved for mating fruit bats.”

And then you get to the prize at the bottom of the Crackerjack box: the crossword puzzle. In especially lucky weeks you get the acrostic, too.

When you finish extracting information from the paper, you can put it to one more use. Take the paper, a bucket of water, and a wheelbarrow full of mulch out to the next area where you’d like to kill a swath of weeds or grass, lay the paper three or

mulch with nyt

four sheets thick right over the weedy grassy whatever, water it from the bucket so it doesn’t blow around, and spread the mulch on top about three inches thick. With a nice big paper like the Sunday New York Times you can cover a lot of ground. Nothing will grow up through it. It’s satisfying to see facts stamping out chaos.

mulch without nyt