Two weekends ago, I walked out into the Saturday morning sun. It was 65 glorious degrees and headed into the mid-70s by afternoon. March had just arrived and March means spring in Memphis. And spring in Memphis means it’s time for Yard Man to get after it.
So I rolled the electric mower out of the garage and ran it over the front yard to mulch last October’s standing leaf harvest. Very satisfying. Very mulchy. I could hear the grass giving thanks.
Then I crawled around the flower beds that make up most of our backyard and clipped and snipped the dead stems, marveling at the annual miracle of perennial shoots emerging from the soil, ready for another season of life. I made a large pile of brown vegetation. Also quite satisfying.
Next, I was drawn like a salmon returning to its home waters, to the Midtown Home Depot, where (as one does) I picked up a mega-package of paper towels, some birdseed for the feeder, six light bulbs, some floor cleaner, two bags of potting soil, and a partridge in a pear tree. And lots of plastic pots of blooming annuals to brighten up the deck — petunias, anemone, lobelia.
There is a clear and simple joy in sitting in the sun and putting fresh plants into old clay pots, digging out last year’s roots and putting the fresh square bundles of soil into their new homes. The smell of loamy earth, the dirty fingernails, the stained trouser knees — all the rituals of spring, of rebirth.
I liberated the faithful hose from its winter abode and filled it with purpose. The new plants were watered and it was good. Yard Man was content. And there was beer.
All was well in the kingdom for a couple of days. I took inordinate pleasure from the new flora each time I walked out the back door — the blues, whites, purples, and yellows. I noticed the buds emerging on the fig tree, the white blossoms on the plums, and the big oaks turning green at their tips. Spring was well and truly sprung.
And then we began to hear rumblings of trouble from the West. A cold front was coming, they said, a real one, with ice and snow and frigid temperatures. They were calling the storm a “cyclone bomb” and saying it would hit Memphis Friday night. We’d be lucky to survive, it appeared. The ensuing weekend would be a frozen, snowy, icy mess. In a city that is still littered with piles of limbs from a February ice storm that left 150,000 people without power, this was not good news.
Alas, the storm did arrive Friday night, right on schedule, and it was a doozy, with sleet, lightning, strong winds, freezing rain, four inches of snow, and temperatures in the mid-20s. I built a fire in the fireplace but there was no joy in it. Feeling fatalistic, I decided to just let my new flowers tough it out. Snow would protect them from freezing, I’d heard. Whatever, spring. You bastard.
The next morning, just one week after I’d welcomed spring to my yard, the city awoke to a coat of thick wet snow. The social-media photos were lovely, folks. Thanks. But there was also sun on this new morning, and lots of it, and before long, rivulets of meltwater were everywhere. Heavy clumps of snow were falling from the trees and rooftops. There were no broken limbs, no power outages. Huzzah.
At midday, I got out in it and walked around the neighborhood, taking in the snowmelt, the wet streets, the bright sun reflecting it all, the warming air. It put me in mind of a John Updike quote that I return to on occasion: “I am now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the physical world, of this planet with its scenery and weather … that every day and season has its beauty and its uses, that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience, that all species of tree and weed have their signature and style and the day is a pageant of clouds.”
When I returned home I was happy to see that the petunias, anemones, and lobelia were blooming bright in their snow-crusted pots, literally no worse for the weather. And I looked again at the buds emerging on the fig tree, the white blossoms on the plums, the big oaks turning green at their tips.
