Idyll Banter Read Online Free Page B

century. He is a conservative Yankee, tough at town meetings, skeptical of most budget initiatives. He served with Shattuck on the town planning commission in the early 1980s, a fact I never knew until he began to speak at the front of the church on the day of her funeral.
    â€œIf any of you want to know how much Tari Shattuck loved this town, how much she cared for all of you, go to the town clerk’s office and take a look at the town plan she wrote,” Thompson said, and then his voice broke abruptly. He might have planned to say more, but if he did he changed his mind, and he started back to his seat. “A flaming liberal!” he said, shaking his head in mock disgust, and I saw some of her family smile through their tears.
    I had found a seat in the choir loft before the service began, so I had the opportunity to see a lot of faces that afternoon: aging hippies with beards and bad neckties, some of the women in peasant skirts; elderly farmers wiping their eyeglasses; teachers from the local school; selectmen past and present; choir members sitting for once in the pews. I saw Goodyears and Nortons and Browns; I saw three generations of families scattered across the church like wildflower seeds.
    I saw more of the town together than I’ve seen even at a town meeting. I saw Lincoln, once again, looking out for its own.

SOWING THE SEEDS
WITH A LITTLE SPROUT
    IN THE NEXT two weeks, I will plant the seeds for my snow peas. In soil rich in compost I will mold beds from dark earth, and into those beds I will tuck the small light green—khaki-colored, really—marbles that with any luck will be robust, flowering plants soon after Memorial Day.
    It is the peas that come first in this garden. I plant them with my hands and one tool: a hoe I purchased at a lawn sale eight years ago for exactly one dollar.
    That day when snow peas go into the ground is one of my favorite days of the year, an hour-long chore that I extend—methodically, but joyfully—into a two-hour ritual. It is, for me, my own personal May Day.
    It is not the May Day of labor rallies—although gardening is certainly about labor, and the fruits and vegetables thereof—but the May Day that celebrates something more primal. Rebirth. Renewal. The reassurance that we have survived another winter, no small accomplishment here in Vermont.
    That’s why I use few tools and no gloves: I want to be, literally, in my garden. I want to feel dirt on my hands.
    Some years, my peas may go into the ground as early as today, April 24; some years, I may have to wait until Mother’s Day. My May Day is hostage to climate, not calendar.
    This spring, the ritual will be especially meaningful. For the first time I will have a child with me, a little girl who will be a few weeks short of six months when I plant. The ritual this year will feel different because I will have with me an audience of one, sitting in something called a Summer Seat: a canvas chair with a back designed to support a small baby’s back and spine.
    During my own private May Day last year my wife was pregnant, but the distance between expectation and parenthood was as incomprehensible as the chasm that exists between a seed and a plant. I am always amazed at the way the seeds I grasp in one closed fist can become a flowering row of bushes thirty feet long and three feet high.
    In my fantasy, the ritual will begin this year not with the moment I tear open a packet of seeds, but when I place my daughter in her chair at the edge of the garden. In my mind’s eye, one of her hands is in her mouth, the other is pulling at the cuff of her sweater. Her feet, in tiny corduroy slippers, touch the grass.
    She watches me as I work, her eyes wide, and because she is watching I may decrease the time the ritual takes—a small concession to an attention span that is short. But it is also possible that this first planting may take even longer, as I pause to explain to her