April News from Waltham Fields Community Farm

Notes from the Field

APRIL is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

T.S. Eliot's words from The Wasteland always come back to me in the spring, usually while I'm on the tractor for the first time, huddled in my coat and gloves against the icy wind under a low ceiling of clouds while the deep brown earth opens up behind me. The children at my son's nursery school make cheerful lists of the sights, smells and sounds of spring – daffodils, flowers, green leaves, bird song – while visitors to the farm wade in mud up to their knees, brace themselves for chilly rain in the bare fields, and smell the compost piles thawing in the thin sunlight. The farm in April is a rude awakening after the peace and quiet of winter.

Every spring, I am jolted back to awareness of the weather, the land, the blooming of indicator flowers and the awakening of the woodchucks after several months of blissful ignorance. Yes, I muse over seed catalogs and watch for winter storms that might pile snow up on the greenhouse from December to February, but I don't check the weather five or six times a day or awake in the night from a dream of soil running through my fingers, ready to plant. In the winter, I exist in what is almost a different state of being, slower, not quite hibernating, but not quite fully awake, either. I don't exactly wish for the level of vigilance and wakefulness that the farming season requires, but I can't seem to avoid it, either. Around the middle of March, as local farmer Ellery Kimball so aptly pointed out, farmers get 'twitchy'. We're still not quite awake yet, but we start to watch the skies, the trees, listen for birds, touch the soil whenever we get near it to test for the frost line, squeeze it to see if water flows, drink lots of coffee. And then one day, usually not the day you would think it would be, usually a cold, gray day when the maples are just beginning to redden on the edges of the fields – the soil is ready, and we are shaken awake, nudged into the season, into responsibility and stewardship and the kind of attention that never quite leaves you, that wakes you in the night to listen for rain on the roof.

So that's where we are this week: on the edge of spring, in the mud, on the tractor in the cold, listening for the birds and watching the tiny green plants unfold in the greenhouse. We're not exactly longing for spring, but we're ready. We're ready.