Hibernateardening

I might have gotten a little spoiled - alright, A BIG ROTTEN SPOILED A LOT!- having lived for more than 15 years in the happiest place on Earth, in the backyard of uncle Walt Disney’s estate (well, maybe more like in an outhouse at the furthest corner of the outer pasture-lands of his Magic Kingdom!) or, simply put, in the O-town, City Beautiful nestled at the heart of warm and sunny Florida. In this place, the greens remain green year round, the winter sky is more brilliant azure than an average person can handle on an ordinary January day and the song of perpetual blooms resounds all the more loudly when the rest of the world is wrapped in snowy blankets and skies of gray. The lucky residents evidence this heaven on Earth by endless uploads of photos of outdoor swimming pools and beach scenes, thus heartlessly harassing our frost-bitten friends up north and rubbing it in with the matching FB status updates.

Life in which cold season’s Fahrenheit range goes between mid-seventies and lower-eighties creates expectations of their own. The husbands here don’t fart, and the wives don’t snore. The children, of course, make only happy noises and never ever kick each other in the face. Those of us lucky enough to live here have adapted quite nicely to the prevailing climate of entitlement to happiness and adjoining assumptions that we should be spared of the suffering common to those ordinary mortals.

So, when it happened last year we all considered it a fluke. The following summer was as hellishly hot as ever, making even the proverbial fake flowers wilt in heat and humidity. We thought we were back in the saddle, looking forward to our well-deserved winter rewards for enduring the typical summer slow-cooker when it happened AGAIN! This time it was even earlier, before Christmas, mind you! Some audacious arctic blast swept across the entire country and shamelessly infringed upon our territory. Round one. What wasn’t killed during the first freeze, died after the second; the skimpy remainder succumbed under the third. We stopped counting after that. Some time between the waves of cold, I finally gave up one of the silliest practices I’d adopted after I moved here - of covering plants with sheets and blankets during the near-freezing temperatures. This year, even plants that were covered died.

I finally hung up my tools and gloves, having abdicated all my outdoor responsibilities and descended into begrudging gardening hibernation until the arctic freeze has passed and more seasonal temperatures arrive. Part of me enjoyed (or at least tried to enjoy) this forced rest. Prying away from the work of our hands doesn’t come naturally to us workaholics, whose sense of worth is tied all too closely to the number of things checked off an imaginary list by the end of the day.

The bitter cold also created (an indoor, heated!) space for more somber reflection (equally unnatural to an average Floridian). Seeing with my own eyes how just a few degree drop in temperature could overnight reduce all my months (or, even years!) worth of hard work down to a rotting pile of stinky yard-waste was… well, quite humbling. And, the knowledge that there was absolutely nothing I could do to prevent it, was even more humbling indeed. To add insult to injury, even now there is still nothing I can do to repair the damage except to wait … and wait… and wait in hope that some day spring indeed will return. And when it does, amidst all the busy, happy work, as the warm sun is shining again and the invisible roots send out new shoots, will my grip loosen on what I know I cannot keep…? …Will I remember that I cannot ensure the permanence of what I love the most except through surrender and death of the very thing I am so desperately trying to preserve?