97: Early Spring

About a month ago I wrote about being impatient and wanting to get out into the garden well ahead of time; in Chicago, I’ve usually had to wait to start yard work until April, and the ground usually isn’t warm enough to plant things until mid-May. Our rapidly changing climate has rewarded my impatience. The rhubarb in the backyard looks like a recognizable plant now, with wrinkly green leaves flattening and widening a little more every day. The daffodils have hit their full height, and I can tell which parts of the backyard get the most sun by the number of yellow blossoms opening up. The prairie rose bush running wild next to the alley is already covered in sticky green leaves, and the domesticated rose bushes elsewhere in the back yard aren’t too far behind it.

Before the fun starts, we have to do some dirty work. The rose bushes need pruning, and the blueberry bush needs to be moved from its planter to a new home in the ground. Last fall we cut down a pair of evergreen arbor vitae trees that had gotten out of hand. The stumps are still in the dirt, and they need to be dug out so we can replace them with lilac bushes. I need to do the math—my least favorite part of gardening—to figure out how much dirt I need to buy for both our indoor and outdoor plants; most of the indoor pots are ready to be replanted, and we’re adding a few outdoor beds this year, which means killing grass and a lot of digging. We need to move our raised garden bed out of its current location (which is too shady) into a space that will get more sun and fewer squirrels. We need to source rocks for garden borders to keep the encroaching grass out of the flowers.

We don’t actually need to do any of it. There are other things clamoring for time and attention; the backyard is in decent shape, as it is, and we’ve already done so much to reclaim it from the weeds that had taken over before we bought the place. I’m not expecting to win the fight against the squirrels and the bunnies, so we likely won’t get many vegetables out of our vegetable garden. The rhubarb will probably thrive if I neglect it. Any additional gardening work feels almost like gilding the lily. I still feel a drive to do it, even if it’s just another way to make the space a little prettier to be in. It’s a twin impulse to my drive to write, to put things in order, to rearrange the furniture a little. None of it needs to be done, but it’s still worth doing, and in that sense, it all feels essential.

What I talked about:

I returned to the Eye of the Duck podcast for their cyberpunk series. This week we talked about Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 movie Strange Days, a movie that I admire, but have a fraught relationship with. We talked about that relationship, as well as Bigelow’s knack for filming violence, then drilled down a little into the nature of cyberpunk itself. Good conversation!

What I watched:

I caught a screening of Love Lies Bleeding this week, and I’ve been thinking about it constantly ever since. Review forthcoming from Seeing & Believing.

What I'm reading:

A friend of mine lent me her copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light. The first chapter suplexed me. I didn’t grow up on L’Engle—the only other book of hers I’ve read is A Wrinkle in Time, and that was the summer between my sophomore and junior years of college. I appreciate the emotional sensitivity of the book so far, and how Vicky (the protagonist) feels truly sixteen, both a child and an adult, insecure and angry and smarter than she gives herself credit for. I can’t wait for the rest of the book to run me aground.