heartbreaking perfect day

It is one of those most perfect days, a gentle blue sky, calm, cool air. I should be home working in my garden, but the almost fevered need to do so -- worked up in late winter and spring -- has died down within.

I am stilling thinking about my garden, doing routine weeding, checking out plants, happy to see good things, mildly agitated at the knawing of japanese beetles stripping some things bare.

But urgency, the electricity compelling me to dig and work in the garden, has ebbed.

There is a time in the summer, when the plants relax a bit. That usually happens as the big heat of summer settles in. All that work and blooming that they did in spring and during the milder days of summer is behind them, and they hang on to survive heat and drier soils.

The odd thing is that this summer we in Indy really have not experienced extended days of harsh warmth and July is almost over. The weather chatterers are commenting that we have not reached 90 degrees (F) this summer. That ficticious standard, the weather record, may be broken. Oh, my.

Yes, we've had hot and dry days, but nothing consistent. Just about the time it feels wearying, a front moves through providing rain and cooler temps.

A good gardener is somebody who is intuitive about the cycles of weather, who instantly relates to what drought or flood means to the plants, who understands and observes the daily condition of soil and plant in relation to weather. This observational obsession should extend past weather to other things like sunshine quality (or lack of it), the need for fertilizing or providing soil amendments, and signs of pest activity.

As I've said before, a good gardener sticks his or her finger in the soil a lot to find out what is going on with these living things arranged artifically to present what we lovingly call a garden.

Since I learned to garden in warmer climates, I am particularly antsy in late winter. The clock inside is programmed to start work earlier than what is safe and possible in our zone 5 (by at least a month to two months).

And in summer, I tend to slow down, realizing that it is too late to do major transplanting or bed work -- the soils are harder, the plants would require excessively close attention and watering, the mosquitoes are hungrier. And, or course, I remember that Texas, the homeland, has two growing seasons, an early spring, and a long fall. Summer, Junish to September, is all about survival. I don't garden there any more, but the instinct survives.

So here I am, lazy to the garden when I could be taking advantage of a few days of Edenic weather.

Come fall, the clock's alarm will clang again, and I will stir, ready to finish work before that season's final days will, as Rilke once wrote, command our work to cease for another winter.