Tag: photography

January Thaw

~ Linda Wright

When I lived in New England, the winter temperatures froze the soil, making it as rigid as cement. Ice crusted the sidewalks, stairs and streets. The most dangerous ice, however, was the wafer-thin sheets you could not see. You knew it was there only after you found yourself slipping and sliding in a frantic attempt to maintain some balance. Layers of old snow would pile up and shrink back, solidifying into granular piles of dirty gray. It had no resemblance to the white fluffy flakes that had fallen from the sky days or weeks before.

 
What was fun as a child became a drudgery as an adult. At the end of the driveway where the snowplows had scraped the street clean, the snow was packed hard and formed into angular chunks. My shoulders ached from shoveling; piling the mounds higher than my head I was hot under my winter coat while my nose was red from the cold.
 
“There’s always a thaw in January,” Mum would say with reverence. “The snow and ice will melt. We’ll have a short break from winter before it returns again in force.” Sure enough, usually in the last week of January, the temperatures would rise above freezing for several days in a row. The fog from the warm air against the cold ground would form drops of dew on windows.  The snow piles along the paths would shrink and some would disappear.  The top layer of ice covering the pond would turn into puddles. I could almost smell the earth softening.
 
Winter in North Florida is not cold; I don’t miss snow or ice. This week, it was warm enough for me to go outdoors without a sweater. Inside, I opened the windows and listened to the birds chirping. The old timers here say it is one of the warmest winters they can remember. The same is true, say my friends up North. Although we are glad, it also makes us feel uneasy. Thirteen of the warmest years since record-keeping began have occurred in the last fifteen years. It is hard to miss the photos of icebergs melting and breaking away. The number of extreme weather catastrophes around the globe are increasing year by year; droughts, massive fires, hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes make it hard not to notice that the climate is changing. 
 
Is it more than an ordinary January thaw?

Beetle Picking

~ Linda Wright ~ 2 Comments

Since moving to Florida, I haven’t seen a Japanese beetle. I grew up in the Northeast and in my memory the Japanese beetles appeared on July 1st each summer. One day there would be none and the next day they seemed to be munching away on every leaf and flower in sight. It was the hallmark that summer had arrived. They were slow moving and when they flew they had a tendency to bump into things, although that was not a problem because they only wanted to go short distances, from one shrub to the next. They carved out scalloped edges and chewed lace patterns into leaves, diminished the petals until the blossoms looked tattered, and did serious damage to a vegetable garden in a few days. Their appetites were awesome.

Their unwavering concentration on eating left them particularly easy for a child to pluck from a plant and examine carefully. They showed little fear or annoyance being held between two fingers and although there legs were prickly, we knew they would not bite or sting us. Their rigid outer shell was iridescent. The large head was glimmering green and the hard body reflected like polished copper.

My mother invested countless hours transforming the sandy soil in our back yard by mixing in compost. She would begin in the early spring planting seeds indoors; then as the weather outdoors began to warm placing the sprouts under the cold frame. She hoed rows for beans, tomatoes, and squash. She never purchased a flower, shrub, or fern, but transplanted many from the gardens of friends, nursing each new one along by carrying cans of water. She would get down on her knees for hours to pull out the weeds.

Mom was not about to let the garden be lost to some tough-skinned beetles, but one thing she would not do is put the children and the birds at risk by using pesticides. The killing had to be one at a time, and as quick as possible, like plucking weeds. Stepping on the bugs was messy and ineffective. Instead my mother partially filled used coffee cans with kerosene oil. It was an odd summer pastime, seeing who could fill the can of oil first. At times four and even five children could be seem going from plant to plant harvesting beetles and dropping them into a can where they suffocated.

I wanted to have fresh squash, pole beans, and ripe tomatoes. The truth is I found beetle picking satisfying. No doubt some of the neighborhood children found the drowning of beetles a way of releasing their anger or frustration.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized that even if one only eats vegetables, some life has been sacrificed.