Sunrise in Thetford Center, VT — by Sally Duston
Welcome to “Dear Daybreak”, a weekly Daybreak column. It features short vignettes about life in the Upper Valley: an encounter, a wry exchange, a poem or anecdote or reflection… Anything that happened in this region or relates to it and that might strike us all as interesting or funny or poignant.
Want to submit your own Dear Daybreak item? Just go here!
Dear Daybreak:
When, in 1979, I finished planting my first Grafton garden, I accidentally dropped a mud-soaked glove. I didn’t realize I'd actually thrown down a gauntlet to Nature.
It had all started in January when a Burpee seed catalog arrived by mail. Bedazzled by portraits of Big Boy, an indeterminate hybrid tomato out of my meteorological league, I figured I'd give him a head start, raising him from seed. Silver Queen corn and other veggies could just be sown in the ground.
Thus began a vigil on our sunny back porch, converted to a nursery. Watering seedlings, I envisioned bodacious tomatoes adorned in salt, olive oil, and basil. When they could withstand transplanting, the tomatoes got the garden's primo spot. Soon Big Boy grew so muscular, he needed tying up. Smeared with dirt, hair flying, I pounded metal posts into the earth, securing his stems with twine. Nature now flung the gauntlet back.
Marigolds, possessing a repellant perfume, failed to protect Big Boy from whiteflies. Beating the flies back required daily hosing. Disgusting cutworms and hornworms were hand-picked: They were what gloves were for. Potato beetles: The theory was if you collected them in a jar and added water—allowing their corpses to putrefy—then sprayed the dead-beetle juice on tomato plants, live beetles would freak out and avoid Big Boy. Unsuccessful.
Enter huge black-and-yellow garden spiders, defenders against all of the above. To an arachnophobe, forming an alliance with them was unnerving. So I sacrificed those Big Boy plants that the spiders claimed, allowing their fruits to rot. This in turn fed the hornworms, which fed the spiders, which grew even huger. During dry spells, Big Boy and Silver Queen became thirsty. I donned a homemade hazmat suit and, armed with a pipe wrench, descended to a cobwebby cellar to whack our ancient water pump back into action.
I was checking on Big Boy one morning when an unfamiliar German shepherd mix nearly knocked me over en route to trampling half the garden. The local authority said, “Next time that mutt shows up, shoot it, bury it, and say nothing.” Unthinkable.
Soon more tomatoes, unclaimed by the spiders, ripened. As I went to pick them, a cow galloped past me en route to my rows of Silver Queen. A dairy farm lay a couple of miles down Route 4, so Bossy must’ve bushwhacked her way through the woods seeking fresh corn. The local authority said, “Shoot it and remember I have a freezer too.” Unbelievable.
By late September, the garden flourished despite flies, worms, beetles, spiders, dry spells, dog, and cow. Yet Nature prevailed: an early frost was forecast. Ready or not, Big Boy had to come in. I no longer had to look at the spiders, who'd sensibly disappeared. But I was forced to look at cardboard boxes filled with green tomatoes on our porch. Wrapped in pages torn from the Burpee catalog, Big Boy eventually would ripen, sort of. But he'd never become bodacious.
— Patricia Kangas Ktistes, now in Rockport, MA
Dear Daybreak:
April Snow
I could write about how thankful I am for this errand
for leading me out to this early spring snow,
or about how I expected it,
now having known some of these wily New Hampshire springs,
or about my surprise still
at winter’s white snow-light
in the wide balcony window,
or about the man driving the bus,
the passenger, neighbor, officemate, partner,
all flecked with April snow,
or about its prompt disappearance
by 4:41pm, quicker than it came,
winter popping in to see how we are faring without him—
but I don’t think I will.
This stroll and the snowmelt
in my knit cap and the robinchirp
in the just-budding bush and my tongue
in the air one last time
says enough.
— Kevin Donohue, Thetford
