Saving the Flowers in the Last Frost

Again, I opened my door at the end of the world.

I shouldn’t have wasted time sitting outside. It was too chilly to get any gardening done, and I was supposed to be researching Pearl Harbor and World War Two to give a presentation to the children at the church outreach. But I didn’t want to be near a computer.

The news on social media was all bad. The case of the innocent men deported to a gulag in El Salvador made my heart race every time I  scrolled past a story. There was headline after headline about how high the grocery prices would get, hundreds of dollars down the drain each month.  The stock market had been plummeting, and would continue to do so.  I don’t have any savings or stock, so I was watching the red line numbly, like looking at photographs of a battle that happened a long time ago. More and more people are beginning to realize what I’ve known since 2016– that America is ruled by a mad king.

Somebody made a remark about the thousands of nuclear weapons the mad king has access to.

That was the last straw. I fled outside and sat on the porch, where Charlie the gray and white stray promptly flopped into my lap.

Jimmy’s boy and the Artful Dodger came by as the cat made herself comfortable. I was afraid the Artful would be jealous or call me a cat burglar, since Charlie is rightfully his. But he smiled, and said he’d been to my porch to play with Charlie twice today while I was busy. He was content to be the titular owner of a cat who thinks she’s mine; the arrangement was a perfect one. We sat together, and made our plans for Easter. We are going to have an egg hunt in my yard that Sunday, or the next bright day after that, for the whole neighborhood gang. There will be cupcakes and decorations. The boys promised to help the younger girls find a good share of the eggs so there wouldn’t be any crying. And then they asked to see the garden.

The wind was bending the ragged grass as I walked around the back, with the cat darting around my ankles. I showed the boys which of the green shoots were crabgrass, dandelions, clover and sourweed. All of those were welcome to grow on the lawn, but I didn’t want any in my vegetable patch. I also showed them that because I’d composted the old sunflower heads and so many of the peas last year, I was getting volunteer sunflowers and pea shoots in my garden. As soon as Jimmy came and cut down those maples devouring the porch, I’d plant a wall of sunflowers in the front yard and another one in back.

I told them that tonight I’d cover both garden patches completely, to save the sunflower seedlings from the frost. “It’s going to dip down into the twenties, but then it will get warm again. It’ll be safe to have plants outside before long.”

“It’s the last frost of the year,” said the Artful Dodger, sounding a little ominous.

That night, I had to drive Michael to his night shift and then do the shopping. It was dark when I got back. The cat was curled up in her box on the front porch, but she darted out to the garden to watch Adrienne and me spread bedsheets over the sunflower seedlings.

It had been raining for an hour already. Now, the rain was turning to sleet. The sleet bombarded us with needles as we ran back and forth, holding out the white sheets so the wind would do some of the work stretching them flat, and then laying them over the ground. It was hard to find bricks to weigh them down with when the sun was  already down. The cat kept stepping on the sheets, just to try and figure out what we were doing. Every time I thought we got them spread out properly, the wind would snatch one and rip it away.

There is nothing colder than a night just below freezing, after several weeks of getting used to warm weather. My hands burned as if the rain was tongues of fire, but we got the job done.

For just a moment, as I surveyed the yard, I shuddered.

Somehow, it seemed to me that the yard was a battlefield, and the white sheets were shrouds.

Inside, I got back on the computer.  All I wanted was to find a recipe, so the children could taste a “war cake” made with no eggs or butter in compliance with rationing. But of course, the next thing I knew, I was scrolling through the news– the  Supreme Court’s decision, those poor men trapped in El Salvador, the promise that it would happen to citizens next. The financial crisis all over the world. The mad king exalting over the chaos.

The wind lashed the sides of the house until I couldn’t stop shivering.

And it was night.