Kate Flora: From time to time, a casual conversation with friends will remind me how
The farmhouse on Sennebec Hill, painting by Karin Rector
different it is to have grown up on a Maine farm, actively tied to the seasons and the production of food. Yes, we got some of our food from grocery stores, but what we could raise ourselves, we did.
In the hilltop farm, spring meant all the counters, desktops, windowsills, and part of the floor would be covered with plants being raised from seed. New varieties would be carefully chosen from the seed catalogues that arrived in January. A shorter growing season? Better resistance to pests? Summer meant long evenings spent at the table after dinner, processing produce for canning and freezing, an activity that connected us to earlier times, when processing food was the only way people ate in the winter. Our parents’ city friends, who came to Maine in the summer, would join us snapping beans and pitting cherries.
Summer meant getting the daily chore lists, neatly typed by my mother, listing the tasks that had to be completed before we would be allowed to go down to the lake to swim. Weeding was high on that list. I don’t recall whether another task was picking the potato beetles off the plants, but likely it was. When my boys were little, their grandmother made it a special treat for them to hunt down those bugs and drop them into cups of soapy water.
Clark children: John, Kate and Sara
Over the summer, the shelves of canned good would fill, carefully processed in the pressure cooker. Because my mother was always afraid it would, literally, blow a gasket, we were sent away for our safety while it was doing its thing. I grew up with a great respect for pressure cookers.
Fall meant that pails of squash, potatoes, and onions were stored in the cement or dirt-floored cellar for the winter. There would be shell beans waiting to dry so they could be shelled, cooked, and canned. Newspapers would be spread on the floor of the summer kitchen to hold squash and any tomatoes that could be rescued from the frost. It was also apple stealing time, when we would drive back roads to find abandoned farms where apple trees still produced. My mother told us that you couldn’t make an apple pie without at least five kinds of apples.
Come January it would all begin again.
That way of growing up connected me to the natural world. And there is no time I feel that connection more than in the spring. In spring, I make myself leave the desk, go outside, and notice the way the world changes every day. The many, many shades of green that grow more homogenized as spring progresses. One gray and gloomy day, it will seem like the buds on trees that line the highway will never become leaves and a few days later, the landscape has exploded into a zillion shades of green interspersed with bits of red. It is the gardening season. It is the bug season. It is the season when the days are suddenly long and we still cannot get enough done.
I am a hereditary gardener. My paternal grandmother had three long swaths of perennial beds in her lawn, with a white garden seat in the center whose lattice supported climbing roses. She also had a rock garden my father built for her when he was teenager. My father had a degree from the Stockbridge School of Agriculture. He along with my little sister Sara, had the kind of gardening touch where it seemed as though they could stretch out their hands and the plants would leap to them like animals wanting to be petted.
My parents were very competitive about gardening. For years, she kept her yearning to garden under wraps so as not to threaten him. Eventually, though, she couldn’t keep her desire for a garden of her own in check and established one outside the back door. He grew more traditional things in a more conventional way—though I do remember the truck being filled with softball-sized watermelons one year—a rarity in Maine back then—and an abundance of cantaloupe. She practiced raised beds with heavily mulched paths and the beds were encircled with marigolds and calendulas to deter pests. Those paths were mulched with newspapers and paperbacks the local drug store was discarding, or papers her classroom was done with. She grew bright purple beans that, disappointingly, turned green when they were cooked. The purple made them easy to harvest.
The Maine Mulch Murder by A. Carman Clark
I inherited their passion though not, alas, their ability. I like to joke that I have a brown thumb and a credit card. It doesn’t mean that I don’t try, though. Right now, although I have a lot of writing and organizing on my plate, I cannot stay inside at the computer. In my earlier, more disciplined (or compulsive years), back when I could write six or eight hours a day, I used to make a bargain with myself: an hour of gardening in the cool of early morning, and then back to work. Lately, I’ve been allowing myself more time in the garden. Partly because I’m slow. Partly because I want to be out there in the midst of the plant explosion, peering down at the ground to see what has survived another winter.
Recently, we were away for two weeks and everything doubled in size, especially the weeds. Those “empty” spaces in the garden I was wondering how to fill? They’re gone. The Japanese maple has grown huge. The golden spirea is a bold splash of yellow. The ligularia are threatening to take over the world. My painter’s palette persicaria, with their green, burgundy, and cream colored leaves, are jumping out from the sea of green. I am having a new bed built so I have a better place for lettuce and tomatoes. I know I should be inside finishing the next Joe Burgess, but spring is too magical to only view through a window. The voice in my head asks: What Matters? What are you waiting for? And What will you regret? These messages say: Be outside now, when the world is impossibly alive. And I listen.
A number of us at the Maine Crime Writers Blog collaborated on a post a couple of weeks ago, “
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Vaughn Hardaker (Monday), Rob Kelley (Tuesday), Kate Flora (Thursday) and Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Friday).
I was excited to see he wrote an introduction to a crime/mystery book I was reading and settled in to see what he had on his mind. This is what he wrote (I am cherry- picking the best parts, the ones that resonated the most to me):
Next week at Maine Crime Writers there will be posts by Brenda Buchanan (Monday), John Clark (Tuesday), Joe Souza (Thursday) and Jule Selbo (Friday).
Blooming early and bountiful after winter in a climate where winters are cold—for lilacs grow as far north as Hudson Bay—this shrub was once planted beside almost every New England home. And, come spring, looking for a five-corolla-lobed lilac, like seeking a four-leaf clover, was supposed to bring good luck.
Kait Carson
Charlene D’Avanzo 
