Even the Mud is a Teacher

Tir and I have had to alter our routine in recent days.  Warmer temperatures have turned Monday's snow into roadway gray soup.  It's one thing to navigate the paved part of the driveway toward the grass where the Corgi's tummy, riding low on genetically short legs, merely gets wet.  We can even make it to the greenhouse without making too much of a mess, allowing us to acquit ourselves of that part of our daily responsibilities.

But retrieving the mail?  No way.  Even skirting the dirt and gravel length of the driveway through the lawn eventually brings us to the culvert beyond the fence, and the muddy road that stretches moat-like between us and the mail.  Without thinking, we tried it once -- a disastrous education requiring the investment of almost an entire roll of paper towels and the ensuing half-hour to rectify.  Yesterday I made the journey solo, but the fact is that we both need our exercise and fresh air.  Today, then, after the greenhouse had been tended we took the long way around the yard.  There the bath of sun has cleared away much of the snow, but the grass beneath kept us relatively unsullied; and the freshly liberated sights and smells kept Tir active and engaged.  Deer have been overnighting with the rabbits under the trees out front -- we incurred the annoyed and snorting exit of one of them early this morning when we stepped outside before light -- and so there are all sorts of interesting scents to inventory and consider.  When it came time to cross the road, I got the impression that even Tir remembered the toweling.  Instead of darting back and forth in his usual gamesmanship, he stood uncharacteristically still so I could pick him up for a free ride to the mailbox and back. 

I am impatient for the growing season -- in my mind skipping over, and thereby sacrificing, these lingering weeks of winter.  It is, I sense in my better moments, a fool's expedience.  In her book, Growing Season:  Life Lessons from the Garden, Arlene Bernstein notes the lessons of the ground:  "be still, be open, be present, witness 'what is' without judgment, let go, and trust what grows naturally in the space."  Tir has better witnessed and reconciled himself to the "what is" than I have, and seems perfectly content. 

Spring will come soon enough, and these days, too, he and the soggy soil are teaching me, are worth living on the farm.  They are days, after all, I'll never get back.  Why begrudge a little mud and a few fewer paper towels?