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Garden Visit, January 29, 2021
by Allex Read
The chill of the winter is a blessing for me. The crunch of crisp unmelted snow under my boots
makes me feel stable in a way neither ice nor bare ground can ever do. I feel like if I reached out to
touch the sun-kissed winter it would flee from me, like a frightened snow hare. Instead, it chills my
forehead, the only skin free to feel its love.
It’s just me and my roommate, the breeze, the tremendous sound of passing cars. We wander
towards campus in the afternoon light. The sun at this time of year has already passed below its zenith,
setting so soon, though it’s only 3 pm. In a few months, it won’t set til 8, but for now it is scarce.
It’s not a long walk to the UMF community garden. I stand in front of the archway, looking in
on the twigs and mounds sticking from the otherwise unblemished snow. It’s melancholy in the
afternoon light, casting long shadows and coloring the snow blue and yellow at the same time.
“It looks kind of like a graveyard,” she says.
“Mhm,” I reply. “But these graves will grow back.”
I break the snow with one boot, stepping into the garden-graveyard. I can almost support myself
on the underlayer of melted and re-frozen snow. I feel bad for stepping in, for a moment, but the garden
was meant for human contact, and I am a human here, touching it now. So I look at the raised beds,
covered in thick blankets of snow. They do look like graves. To one side, a stick labeled “sage” sticks
from the ground like a tiny gravestone. The wooden archway feels like a symbol.
In the spring, this will grow back. People will return, just as we always do, and the earth will
once more be planted with growing things. Weeds will wriggle their way in through cracks and
crevices, and volunteer plants will offer themselves up in the soil they like best. The world has been
shattered, but it will always regrow. The world has been painted with snow every year since I was born.
I always miss it when it leaves.
My roommate is wandering along the sidewalk outside the garden while I stand within it,
among the beds I vaguely remember the blueprints for, but failed to have a hand in creating. There are a
lot of things that I have missed. There are a lot of different ways to miss things, too. I’m tempted to
touch a stalk of dead plant matter penetrating the layers of snow in one bed, but I refrain.
The sun streaks in through the archway signaling the entrance to the garden. The student center
casts a big shadow across it. I’m here.
I step back out of the garden. We stand at the entrance to the library, leaning on the bars, for a
moment, and then we walk home.
Garden Visit - Feb 27 2021
By Allex Read
The snow is dark in the night. My fingers scrape and slide against the edges of a dirtied bank. I
stare. The lanes have been shoveled, or ploughed, I note. There are a handful of nodules poking out of
the fresh layers of snow. Domelike piles placed upon a gaggle of flowerpots.
It’s late in the year, the snow landing in fat melty flakes against our hair and our faces. Outside
the circle K, My roomie and I fail to discuss anything with a woman whose life story is her primary
prerogative. In a meeting the day before, I learned that soil can become corrupted by the piles of dirt-
laden snow I once traversed as a child. The woman at the Circle K wears her mask below her nose as
she tells us that we should wear hats as to not catch pneumonia, or bronchitis. She’s stuck in my mind,
and I will remember years from now.
On my way to do laundry, I wear a hat so as not to catch pneumonia. I stare at the six or seven
or maybe eight flowerpots covered in snow. The snow is not falling anymore by the time I am standing
outside the garden. The world is adrift and sloppy right now, the roads ploughed but the sidewalks still
a slurry of thick wet mud mushed together into sludge. It’s too dangerous to drive now.
There is nothing to be seen. Only feet of snow, up to my elbows and shoulders and head, the
faint suggestion of the ghost of a garden. The dark time of year before the water seeps and squishes and
slides back into the earth. The streetlamps illuminate blue and yellow shades of snow.
Walking home, is a struggle. Every step is a slip n’ slide two inches back. Salt and sand are not
good for a garden.
Garden Visit – March 29, 2021
Allex Read
We walk down the same path together that we had wandered in January, this time on streets
almost bare of snow. Now is the time of year when it feels really satisfying to just dress down, wear a
sweater or maybe even a t-shirt after months of frost. The sun is bright and the dirt damp, wetness
seeping onto the edges of the sidewalk but not quite beating the sun’s drying efforts at its center.
We wander through campus to a completely snowless set of garden beds, some already
sprouting or growing, I bend over to observe some Thyme. It sways gently, a tiny cluster of purple-
green leaves poking up along their stems.
Someone has placed a group of bottles and containers along a trellis, labeled with what I have to
assume are the names of the plants they plan to germinate. We stop to look at them. One has fallen
over, so I tilt it back up-- it’s a coke bottle or something, not quite as rigid and self-supporting as its
milk carton comrades. From a distance, I thought they were little flowers sprouting up from the earth,
but it was just a trick of the eye. Some of these containers will one day contain some flowers, or,
probably, those plants will go in the ground long before they actually flower. I wonder where the
cartons and bottles will go then. What is the plan for them?
We pause to offer a mound of earth its requisite veneration before turning to look at a couple of
slabs of some kind of stone, waiting to be assembled into a bench. I know it’s going to be a bench,
because not far from it, a fully assembled stone slab bench sits, fresh and new. It is laughably easy to
see where this is heading.
The world is coming back to life here. The sun is out, the dirt is rich, the depression of the
sludgy months is starting to come to an end. Here are green things that were completely buried for so
long. As much as I do love the winter, especially in its iciest, stillest depths, I love the spring too, and
the chilly way all the little things come back from their warm holes and quiet resting places. I grew up
surrounded by that cycle, picking bits of creeping thyme from my mother’s garden in the spring and
later, when it blossomed into beautiful purple flowers, I would watch all the bugs come and hang out
on them and harvest their nectar. Springtime is here. The thyme is green in the garden. And maybe
someone planted that little bit of thyme in the UMF community garden from a pot, and it didn’t grow
back from the previous season. I don’t know. But it’s sweet to see it there.
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