In the morning haze I saw a deer bounding through my neighbor’s wheat. The way it arced up out of the rippling green reminded me of nothing so much as a dolphin racing across a still sea. The deer would appear for a moment, a flash of amber, then drop almost from sight, then appear again, until it vanished a final time behind a small rise, heading, I assume, to the fawn it left lying in some inconspicuous corner of the woods.
This field of my neighbor’s looks to be doing fine to my unpracticed eye, despite the rain and cold of the past month. Unlike corn or soy, which must be planted each spring and thus need warm soil and plenty of sunlight to get going, winter wheat takes root as the weather cools, then goes dormant. When spring arrives it greens up right along with the pasture grasses. This year, with a few beautiful weeks of weather at the outset followed by a long run of drab, cloudy weather, an early start made all the difference; a few recent days have been downright summerish, and with the heat the wheat immediately set seedheads.
It’s a bit funny, perhaps, to describe anything plants do as immediate, but if anything in the world of flora warrants the word it is grasses when they decide to flower. One day they are leafy clumps, and the next they have stems waving in the wind. And they truly are flowers, though they are not showy about it. Shake them at the right stage of development and you will see a cloud of pollen puff off of them.
In a normal spring everything hurries forward, but this year has been strange. After an early start, cloudy skies and chilly days made the whole world almost pause. Trees unfurled their new leaves with interminable slowness. The grass kept growing, but only slowly. Farmer’s couldn’t cut hay and couldn’t plant corn. Our cows and sheep had plenty to eat, but the pasture didn’t run away from them as quickly as it usually does this time of year.
The contrast has been heightened by the busyness of life, which has not followed the weather. Between the end of the school year, soccer, birthdays, music lessons, and all the rest, the kids have been rushing from one day to the next. I’ve got a million different things that need to be done, and not enough days in which to do them, from writing to the garden to all the things the farm needs.
For a while there, if I was in the mood to be profound, I could look to nature and try to take a lesson from the deliberate, almost painful slowness with which it was moving. Shouldn’t I try to bring a little bit of that calm into my own life? But now even that is gone. With the recent heat, all the plants and animals seem even more frantic than I feel, as they rush about trying to catch up with all the things they neglected in their May torpor.