January 2013

                                                        THE DEAD OF WINTER  is easier to experience in a place blanketed, or should I say shrouded, with snow. Here on the western slope of the continent winter is gray—much more funereal than the bright white of snow. But it is also green, wholly and endlessly green. Okay, the lawns are patchy, but where the grass fades out the moss moves in in great verdant swaths swollen with the overabundance of rain and mild temperatures. The greens of the giant conifers are almost black, especially when flattened by the lack of shadow against an endless gray sky. If you come here in the winter you will see why Stephenie Meyer set the Twilight series here. It is absolutely vampiric in it’s lack of shadow or reflection. We crave, or at least I crave, those cold 20 degree days with a clear blue sky that makes your vision blistery with spots and flashes. The dry air that makes your lips crack, and your breath a cloudy plume.

There is also a deadness of mind this time of year, that I try to fill with diversion: reading, cooking, watching movies. It might behoove me to let my mind go fallow, like I’ve let this blog go fallow. I have my excuses for that: my laptop and camera were stolen. The subsequent 3 replacement computers were all defective so just when I was set up again I had to start all over. There was a few aggravating months of cyber mayhem. And then the holidays… and no camera.. and no desire.

It’s a frightening thing, this bloodsucking lack of desire, but it is also a blessing.

I went out in the garden and actually saw the untouched decay as beautiful and my tired old gardener’s body sighed a relief at not being filled with a desire to put it all in order. I have  been lazy.

What a delight.

Then those frosty cold days I wished for came. Descended like a kiss from the snowy mountain tops in the distance. Life became crunchy and slippery—in the icy, not the muddy way. The air was crisp and tingled up the nostrils. The sun hurt our eyes like the blind being restored to sight, and my engine kick started.

I am back to work, not on my own garden, but my clients’.

It is hard to stay ‘dead’ for long. One wants to live forever, be in perpetual bloom. That’s why the Northwest is so alluring to this gardener among the many. It never stops. This luscious blood red sasanqua camellia ‘Yuletide’ has been blooming at our front door for a few months now. And probably will continue to bloom until the daffodils start and spring is underway.

“ No rest for the wicked,” my mother used to say.

I say, “No rest for the living.”