The Onion Snow [judd]

I turn over the first chocolate chunk of soil with my garden spade. It is beautiful, rich, and pungent, smooth and shiny on its underside. Later, when I plant the whole garden, early May, I’ll fetch the neighbor’s Roto-tiller, the neighbor who is too old to use his many machines but not too old to plant tomatoes. I’ll till his garden while I’m at it.

But it’s only the shovel for my onion bed. I want to turn the soil by hand, loosen it deep, give the bulbs unconfined soil in which to grow big. I want to smell the dirt not exhaust. I want to see every worm and grub as I break up the clumps and worked in the compost that has been cooking all winter.

It’s a temperate day for March and I know it won’t last. March fair weather doesn’t and shouldn’t. Without some coolness in March, the warmth of April seems like a repeated compliment, nice but not fresh and unexpected and sincere.

The last trace of snow melted three weeks ago. The ground is moist but workable. My spade does its job. Where I have not dug, the ground is packed down by winter, almost gray, flat and hard, futureless. But in my churning I leave a wake of upheaval and promise. When I get my rake after it, the ground will look orderly. It will carry my mark.

I don’t need a big area for my onions but it’s hard to stop digging. The repetition is addictive. It strengthens my belief in the myth that life as an assembly line worker would be less stressful than mine.

Interruption. She brings the phone to me and I notice that she’s getting bigger. Her hooded sweatshirt strains and stretches at the zipper.

“It’s your mother,” she says extending the handset toward me.

“I’m filthy. Tell her I’ll call her back,” I say.

“Did you hear that?” she repeats into the phone. She listens and then laughs.

“She said to call her as soon as you’re done playing in the sandbox,” my wife tells me.
I continue my digging. My father had his sandbox too. ‘A man needs a place to get away,’ he said to me many times before he went away, far too young.

She’s back.

“I think it’s getting colder,” she says. “How much longer are you gonna be out here?”

“I just want to get my onions in,” I reply. “Another half-hour or so.”

The sky darkens, the warm sun from earlier now hidden by clouds, replaced by a chilling north wind. It has all changed so quickly.

“Where’s Jeff and Lisa?” I ask.

“Jeff’s over at Mike’s house and Lisa’s inside watching a video.”

“’kay.”

As she walks away I see that the growth is not just confined to her stomach.

I go back to my digging. Can anything break my concentration on this one task? I treasure every shovel-full. It’s so simple. Every time is the same. The result is predictable, immediate, and useful. No one tells me how to do it. I could dig with the shovel’s handle if I wanted to.

The temperature has dropped nearly 10 degrees in one hour. A dark bank of clouds appears over the crest of the hills to the northwest.

The wind picks up and the onion skins inside the mesh bag begin to rattle. Leaves left over from last fall, once held captive by snow banks, skitter down the alley, free.

The sweat from my digging cools and evaporates under my sweatshirt. I look up at the coming front and shiver so slightly.

I clear the 4’x4’ bed, raking mounds of dirt to each side, and scatter the onion bulbs haphazardly. They didn’t need to be in rows. I will thin them out, harvest many of them for spring onions. The rest will find their way into vegetable juice and onto late summer burgers or will be tied into bunches to dry in the shed.

As the wind increases, a rain starts. No good digging up wet ground and I’m glad the onions are in. I wanted to plant the spinach as well, but that will have to wait, and wait it will. Like so many things, in its time, in its time. If only we let things move at the pace they wish, how much less resistance we have in our lives. What happens happens and so we find out how little influence we really have. But that philosophy only works in a one-man garden.

The shovel is caked with the moist dirt, so I find a rock, a good-sized one with a sharp end and enough size for me to hold onto. I scrape the steel blade until almost all the dirt is back in the garden. It falls in little chunks.

Inside, she’s waiting, watching me out the back window. She was cold and so she has brewed a pot of coffee. Decaffeinated, fine for me this late afternoon. She doesn’t take in caffeine, not now with Johnny-Come-Lately inside her. She’ll wait until he has arrived, and then she’ll return to regular coffee, and a beer now and then, and occasionally something stronger when the girls go out and she calls me from downtown and tells me she’s spending the night at Chelsey’s and I go to sleep alone.

“This blew in fast, didn’t it?” she says.

“Yeah, that’s March for ya,” I reply, getting a cup and pouring some coffee. Inside me my thirst is more for water but my fingers are cold now from holding the rock and scraping my shovel. I hold the cup with both hands, look out the window as the temperature continues to drop, the wind steady, and a light rain going from left to right, west to east, falling at a 45-degree angle, making Isosceles triangles with the yard and the laundry-line posts that stand along the back walk leading to my now empty garden.

We stand there for minutes, her just inches from me. Now that her tummy protrudes, she sometimes forgets where it is. She bumps into things and she is not normally a bumper but a smooth and agile evader. Her left hand unconsciously strokes the side of her tummy as her right hand holds the mug and slowly lifts it to her mouth, sipping slowly, never in quick repetition as I do.

“Hot beverages are to be sipped slowly,” she has said many times to me as she expounds on her life rulebook, the one she continues to write, edit and change as we go through our marriage.

“I don’t know how you drink your coffee so fast,” she says this time.

I say nothing. There is nothing to say. I have told her time and again that is the way it is, and I will change many things for you but please let me have my coffee the way I like it (black) and at the speed I like it.

As she sips, her lips purse and lines form in her skin. I have only begun to notice recently that her face is showing the wear from too much tanning. It looks healthy in the summer, but in the winter, when the brown is gone, she is just left with faded leather. She has the belly of a 25 year old but the face of the 40 year old she is.

When she was pregnant with Jeff she was 25. I look at photos now of her baby shower and she looks like a baby herself. She won’t let me photograph her this time.
The rain is different now. The drops have grown in size and I realize it is turning to snow. Just that quickly.

“This won’t amount to anything,” she says.

I say, “Never does in March.”

She finds the one exception to my statement. “Remember the March blizzard of ’93?” she comes back.

Yes, I do, but I won’t bother saying it.

We watch a while longer. The rain stops. But the wind remains and dark clouds move by to the north.

“I’m going to shower,” I say finally.

“What do you want for dinner?”

“Let’s just go to the diner.”

“Fine.”

Upstairs, I take off my dirty jeans and put them in the wash. I shave – my one weekend shave – and shower. My fingernails are still a little dirty when I’m done, but I like that. My grandfather the farmer never had completely clean hands. I used to look at them as he ate a sandwich and marvel at how gnarled and scarred they were. His left pinky was half its original length. I used to sit next to him in church and dare myself to touch it.

I look at my hands. Beyond the dirty fingernails, the rest of my hands are soft, almost dainty. The only callus I have is on the middle finger of my right hand, from my pen.

I dress. Clean jeans, Penn State sweatshirt, good sneakers. Diner-wear.

As I come downstairs, I look out the window for the first time since stepping into the bathroom. The rain has fully turned to a snow. Huge flakes look like white Wheaties. The grass is covered, snow clinging to the blades that had just started to turn green. The streets and sidewalks, though, are just wet. Even the bare ground of the flower beds and gardens do not play host to the snow flakes, melting them on contact.

“The Onion Snow,” I say to myself but loud enough that Lisa hears it above the din of her video.

“What?”

“I said, ‘It’s an onion snow.’”

“Why do they call it that?”

“Because it comes late, about the time you’re planting your onions and it’s supposed to help the onions grow.” It comes about the time when you think there will be no more snow. Just when you think you have it all figured out and you can do what you want with your garden.