It’s Always More Subtle Than You Think

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When you’re stuck indoors most of the day every day, it’s easy to forget.

When you live in the mostly flat, corn- and soybean-covered plains, it’s easy to forget.

When you fall into the patterns of phatic language, it’s easy to forget.

It’s easy to forget that things are more subtle than you might imagine. The changing of the seasons. This is not something that happens overnight. The geography and geology in which you live. What you’re really thinking, feeling and needing in any given moment.

It’s easy to forget that there is not just autumn, but a million shades of turning season to appreciate.

It’s easy to forget that there is more than the flat cornfields of Illinois (that landscape that has driven most of the people I know and love to exclaim out loud at one point or another that they could not wait to escape this wasteland, though many of them seem to keep coming back).

It’s easy to forget that anger, fear, joy, love…are a little bit different every time they are experienced.

I forget. A lot of the time. I will nod when I hear someone say, “Oh it’s a shame the leaves only last a few days.” Or, “Why does it have to go straight from summer to winter in a day here?” Or, “It’s just a big, ugly monoculture.” Or, “It’s arctic already!” (In October, in 40-degree weather. Despite the fact that a 40-degree day in March would bring the same people outdoors in shorts and a light jacket.)

Then the garden reminds me. It reminds me that every day–sometimes every hour–can bring a change.

In one day, a squash vine can grow more than 2 inches. No kidding. I swear there have been days in the garden when a clear path in the morning was suddenly impeded by squash vines in the evening. In an hour, you can plant six tomato seedlings, 12 pepper seedlings, and any number of herbs and vegetable seeds, then sit back and love your work and try to pick the dirt out from under your fignernails. (That dirt is persistent, even when you wear gloves it makes its way under there, proclaiming “We are gardening hands” to the fingernail-inspection police.)

And in the autumn, just when you think there are no surprises left in the garden, you can go out to cover it with its bed of leaves for the winter and find surprises. Like carrots you don’t remember planting. Like rosemary that is still growing strong, even after numerous frosts. Like dill that decided to go ahead and sprout its feathery little head. Radishes that planted themselves.

In the autumn, in the garden, I remember.

That everything is more subtle than our daily forgetfulness would make it. That when we stop and pay attention, there is beauty in almost any landscape. That the changing of the leaves this year lasted from just after my birthday in September and is still going now in November, as I sit and look at the bright orange trees tinged with an inner living green and an outer dusting of burgundy across the street.

It’s always more subtle than you think.

So take some time today, if you can. See if you can find three things that are more subtle than you give them credit for. (Share them here if you’d like!)

Here are a few of my own thoughts:

1. The garden has countless seasons, from the first peeking up of the winter aconite through the early spring snows through the last carrots pulled from under their quilts of leaves in late December. And even in the deep, dark, deadness of winter, something transformative is happening deep in the ground, where Trevor the Toad takes his long nap below the frost line.

2. The place I live is not just cornfields, but a crazy quilt of rivers, humans and even occasional hills and cliffs. (No, really!)

3. As the season changes from hot wet summer to cold dry winter, there are any number of in-between moods the weather might take. Some weeks will feel like an endless gray mist, and some days, even in December, will be so warm and sunny that you’ll think you’ve been thrown backward toward summer again.

4. I can be joyfully, exuberantly happy and branching out into the world with that cheer, and I can also be quietly, peacefully content and letting those feelings sink inward and downward, extending my roots. Both are good.

This weekend I bought a dozen red roses and put them in a vase on the dining room table. Every hour, their appearance and scent changes as the velvety red petals slowly open and release.

Thanks, world, for offering so much abundance and variety. So much that my head can hardly stand it and must use language to narrow it down. So much that my heart can be filled and delighted with a simple walk into the garden on a sunny November day.

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